Standardized Methods and Recommendations for Green Federated Learning

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2602.00343v1
• Date: Fri, 30 Jan 2026 21:46:36 GMT
• Title: Standardized Methods and Recommendations for Green Federated Learning
• Authors: Austin Tapp, Holger R. Roth, Ziyue Xu, Abhijeet Parida, Hareem Nisar, Marius George Linguraru,
• Abstract summary: Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative model training over privacy-sensitive, distributed data, but its environmental impact is difficult to compare across studies.<n>We present a practical carbon-accounting methodology for FL CO2e tracking using NVIDIA NVFlare and CodeCarbon.
• Score: 4.07505182773706
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
• Abstract: Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative model training over privacy-sensitive, distributed data, but its environmental impact is difficult to compare across studies due to inconsistent measurement boundaries and heterogeneous reporting. We present a practical carbon-accounting methodology for FL CO2e tracking using NVIDIA NVFlare and CodeCarbon for explicit, phase-aware tasks (initialization, per-round training, evaluation, and idle/coordination). To capture non-compute effects, we additionally estimate communication emissions from transmitted model-update sizes under a network-configurable energy model. We validate the proposed approach on two representative workloads: CIFAR-10 image classification and retinal optic disk segmentation. In CIFAR-10, controlled client-efficiency scenarios show that system-level slowdowns and coordination effects can contribute meaningfully to carbon footprint under an otherwise fixed FL protocol, increasing total CO2e by 8.34x (medium) and 21.73x (low) relative to the high-efficiency baseline. In retinal segmentation, swapping GPU tiers (H100 vs.\ V100) yields a consistent 1.7x runtime gap (290 vs. 503 minutes) while producing non-uniform changes in total energy and CO2e across sites, underscoring the need for per-site and per-round reporting. Overall, our results support a standardized carbon accounting method that acts as a prerequisite for reproducible 'green' FL evaluation. Our code is available at https://github.com/Pediatric-Accelerated-Intelligence-Lab/carbon_footprint.

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