Jae-won Yoon, an integrated master's/Ph.D. student, and Yong-jeong Oh, a Ph.D. student in POSTECH's Department of Electrical Engineering, both advised by Professor Yo-sep Jeon, received an Outstanding Paper Award at the 2023 Summer Conference of the Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences (KICS) for “Sparsification-Based Compression Techniques for Communication-Efficient Federated Learning.”

To address communication overhead in federated learning, the paper proposed a model-update compression method using sparsification and quantization, together with a reconstruction method using the Bussgang technique and linear minimum mean square error (LMMSE) detection.

The proposed compression and reconstruction methods were shown to substantially reduce communication overhead without a major loss in federated learning performance.