Guest Editorial: Special Issue on Resource-Efficient Collaborative Deep Learning Over B5G/6G Networks

Collaborative machine learning is considered as the bedrock of the intelligent B5G networks, where distributed agents collaborate with each other to train learning models in a distributed fashion, without sharing data at a central entity. Despite its broad applicability, the main issue of collaborative learning is the need of local computing to build local learning models as well as iterative information exchange among agents, which may lead to high resource overhead unaffordable in many practical resource-limited systems such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and Internet of Things (IoT). To alleviate this resource issue, it is essential to devise resource-efficient collaborative learning techniques, that can optimize the resource overhead in terms of communication, computing, and energy cost, and hence achieve satisfactory optimization/learning performance simultaneously.