Inverse Probability Weighting and Age-of-Information Aggregation for Decentralized Federated Learning under Partial Reception

Abstract

Decentralized Federated Learning (DFL) over lossy wireless networks faces two key challenges: selection bias, where updates from poor-quality links are systematically underrepresented due to partial model reception, and update staleness, where asynchronous nodes contribute outdated information. We show that uniform gossip aggregation with local-fill reconstruction introduces persistent link-quality-induced bias, while completeness-based weighting further amplifies this effect. To address these challenges, we propose DFL-AA (Decentralized Federated Learning with Adaptive AoI-weighted Aggregation), which combines Inverse Probability Weighting with online EWMA-based channel estimation to correct selection bias and Age-of-Information-based weighting to mitigate staleness without requiring global synchronization. We theoretically show that DFL-AA removes link-quality distortion in expectation and experimentally demonstrate consistent improvements over state-of-the-art baselines across varying loss rates, network sizes, and heterogeneous wireless conditions.