Hierarchical Federated Learning Architectures for the Metaverse

Abstract: In the context of edge computing environments in general and the metaverse in particular, federated learning (FL) has emerged as a distributed machine learning paradigm that allows multiple users to collaborate on training a shared machine learning model locally, eliminating the need for uploading raw data to a central server. It is perhaps the only training paradigm that preserves the privacy of user data, which is essential for computing environments as personal as the metaverse. However, the original FL architecture proposed is not scalable to a large number of user devices in the metaverse community. To mitigate this problem, hierarchical federated learning (HFL) has been introduced as a general distributed learning paradigm, and has since then inspired and led to a number of research works. In this paper, we present several types of HFL architectures, with a special focus on the three-layer client-edge-cloud HFL architecture, which is most pertinent to the metaverse due to its delay-sensitive nature. We also examine works that take advantage of the natural layered organization of three-layer client-edge-cloud HFL to tackle some of the most challenging problems in FL within the metaverse. Finally, we outline some future research directions of HFL in the metaverse.

Keywords: federated learning; hierarchical federated learning; metaverse