Federated Learning has been introduced as a new machine learning paradigm enhancing the use of local devices. At a server level, FL regularly aggregates models learned locally on distributed clients to obtain a more general model. In this way, no private data is sent over the network, and the communication cost is reduced. However, current solutions rely on the availability of large amounts of stored data at the client side in order to fine-tune the models sent by the server. Such setting is not realistic in mobile pervasive computing where data storage must be kept low and data characteristic (distribution) can change dramatically. To account for this variability, a solution is to use the data regularly collected by the client to progressively adapt the received model. But such naive approach exposes clients to the well-known problem of catastrophic forgetting. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate this problem in the mobile human activity recognition context on smartphones.
Federated Learning (FL) wherein multiple institutions collaboratively train a machine learning model without sharing data is becoming popular. Participating institutions might not contribute equally, some contribute more data, some better quality data or some more diverse data. To fairly rank the contribution of different institutions, Shapley value (SV) has emerged as the method of choice. Exact SV computation is impossibly expensive, especially when there are hundreds of contributors. Existing SV computation techniques use approximations. However, in healthcare where the number of contributing institutions are likely not of a colossal scale, computing exact SVs is still exorbitantly expensive, but not impossible. For such settings, we propose an efficient SV computation technique called SaFE (Shapley Value for Federated Learning using Ensembling). We empirically show that SaFE computes values that are close to exact SVs, and that it performs better than current SV approximations. This is particularly relevant in medical imaging setting where widespread heterogeneity across institutions is rampant and fast accurate data valuation is required to determine the contribution of each participant in multi-institutional collaborative learning.
In contrast to training traditional machine learning (ML) models in data centers, federated learning (FL) trains ML models over local datasets contained on resource-constrained heterogeneous edge devices. Existing FL algorithms aim to learn a single global model for all participating devices, which may not be helpful to all devices participating in the training due to the heterogeneity of the data across the devices. Recently, Hanzely and Richt\'{a}rik (2020) proposed a new formulation for training personalized FL models aimed at balancing the trade-off between the traditional global model and the local models that could be trained by individual devices using their private data only. They derived a new algorithm, called Loopless Gradient Descent (L2GD), to solve it and showed that this algorithms leads to improved communication complexity guarantees in regimes when more personalization is required. In this paper, we equip their L2GD algorithm with a bidirectional compression mechanism to further reduce the communication bottleneck between the local devices and the server. Unlike other compression-based algorithms used in the FL-setting, our compressed L2GD algorithm operates on a probabilistic communication protocol, where communication does not happen on a fixed schedule. Moreover, our compressed L2GD algorithm maintains a similar convergence rate as vanilla SGD without compression. To empirically validate the efficiency of our algorithm, we perform diverse numerical experiments on both convex and non-convex problems and using various compression techniques.
The Shapley value (SV) is a fair and principled metric for contribution evaluation in cross-silo federated learning (cross-silo FL), in which organizations, i.e., clients, collaboratively train prediction models with the coordination of a parameter server. However, existing SV calculation methods for FL assume that the server can access the raw FL models and public test data, which might not be a valid assumption in practice given the emerging privacy attacks on FL models and that test data might be clients' private assets. Hence, in this paper, we investigate the problem of secure SV calculation for cross-silo FL. We first propose a one-server solution, HESV, which is based solely on homomorphic encryption (HE) for privacy protection and has some considerable limitations in efficiency. To overcome these limitations, we further propose an efficient two-server protocol, SecSV, which has the following novel features. First, SecSV utilizes a hybrid privacy protection scheme to avoid ciphertext-ciphertext multiplications between test data and models, which are extremely expensive under HE. Second, a more efficient secure matrix multiplication method is proposed for SecSV. Third, SecSV strategically identifies and skips some test samples without significantly affecting the evaluation accuracy. Our experiments demonstrate that SecSV is 5.9-18.0 times as fast as HESV while sacrificing a limited loss in the accuracy of calculated SVs.
Federated Learning (FL) is a machine learning paradigm where local nodes collaboratively train a central model while the training data remains decentralized. Existing FL methods typically share model parameters or employ co-distillation to address the issue of unbalanced data distribution. However, they suffer from communication bottlenecks. More importantly, they risk privacy leakage. In this work, we develop a privacy preserving and communication efficient method in a FL framework with one-shot offline knowledge distillation using unlabeled, cross-domain public data. We propose a quantized and noisy ensemble of local predictions from completely trained local models for stronger privacy guarantees without sacrificing accuracy. Based on extensive experiments on image classification and text classification tasks, we show that our privacy-preserving method outperforms baseline FL algorithms with superior performance in both accuracy and communication efficiency.
With privacy legislation empowering users with the right to be forgotten, it has become essential to make a model forget about some of its training data. We explore the problem of removing any client's contribution in federated learning (FL). During FL rounds, each client performs local training to learn a model that minimizes the empirical loss on their private data. We propose to perform unlearning at the client (to be erased) by reversing the learning process, i.e., training a model to \emph{maximize} the local empirical loss. In particular, we formulate the unlearning problem as a constrained maximization problem by restricting to an $\ell_2$-norm ball around a suitably chosen reference model to help retain some knowledge learnt from the other clients' data. This allows the client to use projected gradient descent to perform unlearning. The method does neither require global access to the data used for training nor the history of the parameter updates to be stored by the aggregator (server) or any of the clients. Experiments on the MNIST dataset show that the proposed unlearning method is efficient and effective.
Federated learning (FL) provides an efficient paradigm to jointly train a global model leveraging data from distributed users. As the local training data come from different users who may not be trustworthy, several studies have shown that FL is vulnerable to poisoning attacks. Meanwhile, to protect the privacy of local users, FL is always trained in a differentially private way (DPFL). Thus, in this paper, we ask: Can we leverage the innate privacy property of DPFL to provide certified robustness against poisoning attacks? Can we further improve the privacy of FL to improve such certification? We first investigate both user-level and instance-level privacy of FL and propose novel mechanisms to achieve improved instance-level privacy. We then provide two robustness certification criteria: certified prediction and certified attack cost for DPFL on both levels. Theoretically, we prove the certified robustness of DPFL under a bounded number of adversarial users or instances. Empirically, we conduct extensive experiments to verify our theories under a range of attacks on different datasets. We show that DPFL with a tighter privacy guarantee always provides stronger robustness certification in terms of certified attack cost, but the optimal certified prediction is achieved under a proper balance between privacy protection and utility loss.
Cross-silo Federated learning (FL) has become a promising tool in machine learning applications for healthcare. It allows hospitals/institutions to train models with sufficient data while the data is kept private. To make sure the FL model is robust when facing heterogeneous data among FL clients, most efforts focus on personalizing models for clients. However, the latent relationships between clients' data are ignored. In this work, we focus on a special non-iid FL problem, called Domain-mixed FL, where each client's data distribution is assumed to be a mixture of several predefined domains. Recognizing the diversity of domains and the similarity within domains, we propose a novel method, FedDAR, which learns a domain shared representation and domain-wise personalized prediction heads in a decoupled manner. For simplified linear regression settings, we have theoretically proved that FedDAR enjoys a linear convergence rate. For general settings, we have performed intensive empirical studies on both synthetic and real-world medical datasets which demonstrate its superiority over prior FL methods.
With its powerful capability to deal with graph data widely found in practical applications, graph neural networks (GNNs) have received significant research attention. However, as societies become increasingly concerned with data privacy, GNNs face the need to adapt to this new normal. This has led to the rapid development of federated graph neural networks (FedGNNs) research in recent years. Although promising, this interdisciplinary field is highly challenging for interested researchers to enter into. The lack of an insightful survey on this topic only exacerbates this problem. In this paper, we bridge this gap by offering a comprehensive survey of this emerging field. We propose a unique 3-tiered taxonomy of the FedGNNs literature to provide a clear view into how GNNs work in the context of Federated Learning (FL). It puts existing works into perspective by analyzing how graph data manifest themselves in FL settings, how GNN training is performed under different FL system architectures and degrees of graph data overlap across data silo, and how GNN aggregation is performed under various FL settings. Through discussions of the advantages and limitations of existing works, we envision future research directions that can help build more robust, dynamic, efficient, and interpretable FedGNNs.
Catastrophic forgetting refers to the tendency that a neural network "forgets" the previous learned knowledge upon learning new tasks. Prior methods have been focused on overcoming this problem on convolutional neural networks (CNNs), where the input samples like images lie in a grid domain, but have largely overlooked graph neural networks (GNNs) that handle non-grid data. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme dedicated to overcoming catastrophic forgetting problem and hence strengthen continual learning in GNNs. At the heart of our approach is a generic module, termed as topology-aware weight preserving~(TWP), applicable to arbitrary form of GNNs in a plug-and-play fashion. Unlike the main stream of CNN-based continual learning methods that rely on solely slowing down the updates of parameters important to the downstream task, TWP explicitly explores the local structures of the input graph, and attempts to stabilize the parameters playing pivotal roles in the topological aggregation. We evaluate TWP on different GNN backbones over several datasets, and demonstrate that it yields performances superior to the state of the art. Code is publicly available at \url{//github.com/hhliu79/TWP}.
Deep neural networks have achieved remarkable success in computer vision tasks. Existing neural networks mainly operate in the spatial domain with fixed input sizes. For practical applications, images are usually large and have to be downsampled to the predetermined input size of neural networks. Even though the downsampling operations reduce computation and the required communication bandwidth, it removes both redundant and salient information obliviously, which results in accuracy degradation. Inspired by digital signal processing theories, we analyze the spectral bias from the frequency perspective and propose a learning-based frequency selection method to identify the trivial frequency components which can be removed without accuracy loss. The proposed method of learning in the frequency domain leverages identical structures of the well-known neural networks, such as ResNet-50, MobileNetV2, and Mask R-CNN, while accepting the frequency-domain information as the input. Experiment results show that learning in the frequency domain with static channel selection can achieve higher accuracy than the conventional spatial downsampling approach and meanwhile further reduce the input data size. Specifically for ImageNet classification with the same input size, the proposed method achieves 1.41% and 0.66% top-1 accuracy improvements on ResNet-50 and MobileNetV2, respectively. Even with half input size, the proposed method still improves the top-1 accuracy on ResNet-50 by 1%. In addition, we observe a 0.8% average precision improvement on Mask R-CNN for instance segmentation on the COCO dataset.