Federated Learning (FL) enables training ML models on edge clients without sharing data. However, the federated model's performance on local data varies, disincentivising the participation of clients who benefit little from FL. Fair FL reduces accuracy disparity by focusing on clients with higher losses while personalisation locally fine-tunes the model. Personalisation provides a participation incentive when an FL model underperforms relative to one trained locally. For situations where the federated model provides a lower accuracy than a model trained entirely locally by a client, personalisation improves the accuracy of the pre-trained federated weights to be similar to or exceed those of the local client model. This paper evaluates two Fair FL (FFL) algorithms as starting points for personalisation. Our results show that FFL provides no benefit to relative performance in a language task and may double the number of underperforming clients for an image task. Instead, we propose Personalisation-aware Federated Learning (PaFL) as a paradigm that pre-emptively uses personalisation losses during training. Our technique shows a 50% reduction in the number of underperforming clients for the language task while lowering the number of underperforming clients in the image task instead of doubling it. Thus, evidence indicates that it may allow a broader set of devices to benefit from FL and represents a promising avenue for future experimentation and theoretical analysis.
Over the past few years, Federated Learning (FL) has become an emerging machine learning technique to tackle data privacy challenges through collaborative training. In the Federated Learning algorithm, the clients submit a locally trained model, and the server aggregates these parameters until convergence. Despite significant efforts that have been made to FL in fields like computer vision, audio, and natural language processing, the FL applications utilizing multimodal data streams remain largely unexplored. It is known that multimodal learning has broad real-world applications in emotion recognition, healthcare, multimedia, and social media, while user privacy persists as a critical concern. Specifically, there are no existing FL benchmarks targeting multimodal applications or related tasks. In order to facilitate the research in multimodal FL, we introduce FedMultimodal, the first FL benchmark for multimodal learning covering five representative multimodal applications from ten commonly used datasets with a total of eight unique modalities. FedMultimodal offers a systematic FL pipeline, enabling end-to-end modeling framework ranging from data partition and feature extraction to FL benchmark algorithms and model evaluation. Unlike existing FL benchmarks, FedMultimodal provides a standardized approach to assess the robustness of FL against three common data corruptions in real-life multimodal applications: missing modalities, missing labels, and erroneous labels. We hope that FedMultimodal can accelerate numerous future research directions, including designing multimodal FL algorithms toward extreme data heterogeneity, robustness multimodal FL, and efficient multimodal FL. The datasets and benchmark results can be accessed at: //github.com/usc-sail/fed-multimodal.
In federated frequency estimation (FFE), multiple clients work together to estimate the frequencies of their collective data by communicating with a server that respects the privacy constraints of Secure Summation (SecSum), a cryptographic multi-party computation protocol that ensures that the server can only access the sum of client-held vectors. For single-round FFE, it is known that count sketching is nearly information-theoretically optimal for achieving the fundamental accuracy-communication trade-offs [Chen et al., 2022]. However, we show that under the more practical multi-round FEE setting, simple adaptations of count sketching are strictly sub-optimal, and we propose a novel hybrid sketching algorithm that is provably more accurate. We also address the following fundamental question: how should a practitioner set the sketch size in a way that adapts to the hardness of the underlying problem? We propose a two-phase approach that allows for the use of a smaller sketch size for simpler problems (e.g. near-sparse or light-tailed distributions). We conclude our work by showing how differential privacy can be added to our algorithm and verifying its superior performance through extensive experiments conducted on large-scale datasets.
With the emergence of privacy leaks in federated learning, secure aggregation protocols that mainly adopt either homomorphic encryption or threshold secret sharing have been widely developed for federated learning to protect the privacy of the local training data of each client. However, these existing protocols suffer from many shortcomings, such as the dependence on a trusted third party, the vulnerability to clients being corrupted, low efficiency, the trade-off between security and fault tolerance, etc. To solve these disadvantages, we propose an efficient and multi-private key secure aggregation scheme for federated learning. Specifically, we skillfully modify the variant ElGamal encryption technique to achieve homomorphic addition operation, which has two important advantages: 1) The server and each client can freely select public and private keys without introducing a trust third party and 2) Compared to the variant ElGamal encryption, the plaintext space is relatively large, which is more suitable for the deep model. Besides, for the high dimensional deep model parameter, we introduce a super-increasing sequence to compress multi-dimensional data into 1-D, which can greatly reduce encryption and decryption times as well as communication for ciphertext transmission. Detailed security analyses show that our proposed scheme achieves the semantic security of both individual local gradients and the aggregated result while achieving optimal robustness in tolerating both client collusion and dropped clients. Extensive simulations demonstrate that the accuracy of our scheme is almost the same as the non-private approach, while the efficiency of our scheme is much better than the state-of-the-art homomorphic encryption-based secure aggregation schemes. More importantly, the efficiency advantages of our scheme will become increasingly prominent as the number of model parameters increases.
Federated learning (FL) as distributed machine learning has gained popularity as privacy-aware Machine Learning (ML) systems have emerged as a technique that prevents privacy leakage by building a global model and by conducting individualized training of decentralized edge clients on their own private data. The existing works, however, employ privacy mechanisms such as Secure Multiparty Computing (SMC), Differential Privacy (DP), etc. Which are immensely susceptible to interference, massive computational overhead, low accuracy, etc. With the increasingly broad deployment of FL systems, it is challenging to ensure fairness and maintain active client participation in FL systems. Very few works ensure reasonably satisfactory performances for the numerous diverse clients and fail to prevent potential bias against particular demographics in FL systems. The current efforts fail to strike a compromise between privacy, fairness, and model performance in FL systems and are vulnerable to a number of additional problems. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey stating the basic concepts of FL, the existing privacy challenges, techniques, and relevant works concerning privacy in FL. We also provide an extensive overview of the increasing fairness challenges, existing fairness notions, and the limited works that attempt both privacy and fairness in FL. By comprehensively describing the existing FL systems, we present the potential future directions pertaining to the challenges of privacy-preserving and fairness-aware FL systems.
Federated Learning (FL) has been recently receiving increasing consideration from the cybersecurity community as a way to collaboratively train deep learning models with distributed profiles of cyber threats, with no disclosure of training data. Nevertheless, the adoption of FL in cybersecurity is still in its infancy, and a range of practical aspects have not been properly addressed yet. Indeed, the Federated Averaging algorithm at the core of the FL concept requires the availability of test data to control the FL process. Although this might be feasible in some domains, test network traffic of newly discovered attacks cannot be always shared without disclosing sensitive information. In this paper, we address the convergence of the FL process in dynamic cybersecurity scenarios, where the trained model must be frequently updated with new recent attack profiles to empower all members of the federation with the latest detection features. To this aim, we propose FLAD (adaptive Federated Learning Approach to DDoS attack detection), an FL solution for cybersecurity applications based on an adaptive mechanism that orchestrates the FL process by dynamically assigning more computation to those members whose attacks profiles are harder to learn, without the need of sharing any test data to monitor the performance of the trained model. Using a recent dataset of DDoS attacks, we demonstrate that FLAD outperforms state-of-the-art FL algorithms in terms of convergence time and accuracy across a range of unbalanced datasets of heterogeneous DDoS attacks. We also show the robustness of our approach in a realistic scenario, where we retrain the deep learning model multiple times to introduce the profiles of new attacks on a pre-trained model.
Designing and generating new data under targeted properties has been attracting various critical applications such as molecule design, image editing and speech synthesis. Traditional hand-crafted approaches heavily rely on expertise experience and intensive human efforts, yet still suffer from the insufficiency of scientific knowledge and low throughput to support effective and efficient data generation. Recently, the advancement of deep learning induces expressive methods that can learn the underlying representation and properties of data. Such capability provides new opportunities in figuring out the mutual relationship between the structural patterns and functional properties of the data and leveraging such relationship to generate structural data given the desired properties. This article provides a systematic review of this promising research area, commonly known as controllable deep data generation. Firstly, the potential challenges are raised and preliminaries are provided. Then the controllable deep data generation is formally defined, a taxonomy on various techniques is proposed and the evaluation metrics in this specific domain are summarized. After that, exciting applications of controllable deep data generation are introduced and existing works are experimentally analyzed and compared. Finally, the promising future directions of controllable deep data generation are highlighted and five potential challenges are identified.
The cyber-threat landscape has evolved tremendously in recent years, with new threat variants emerging daily, and large-scale coordinated campaigns becoming more prevalent. In this study, we propose CELEST (CollaborativE LEarning for Scalable Threat detection), a federated machine learning framework for global threat detection over HTTP, which is one of the most commonly used protocols for malware dissemination and communication. CELEST leverages federated learning in order to collaboratively train a global model across multiple clients who keep their data locally, thus providing increased privacy and confidentiality assurances. Through a novel active learning component integrated with the federated learning technique, our system continuously discovers and learns the behavior of new, evolving, and globally-coordinated cyber threats. We show that CELEST is able to expose attacks that are largely invisible to individual organizations. For instance, in one challenging attack scenario with data exfiltration malware, the global model achieves a three-fold increase in Precision-Recall AUC compared to the local model. We deploy CELEST on two university networks and show that it is able to detect the malicious HTTP communication with high precision and low false positive rates. Furthermore, during its deployment, CELEST detected a set of previously unknown 42 malicious URLs and 20 malicious domains in one day, which were confirmed to be malicious by VirusTotal.
Federated learning (FL) has been developed as a promising framework to leverage the resources of edge devices, enhance customers' privacy, comply with regulations, and reduce development costs. Although many methods and applications have been developed for FL, several critical challenges for practical FL systems remain unaddressed. This paper provides an outlook on FL development, categorized into five emerging directions of FL, namely algorithm foundation, personalization, hardware and security constraints, lifelong learning, and nonstandard data. Our unique perspectives are backed by practical observations from large-scale federated systems for edge devices.
Federated learning enables multiple parties to collaboratively train a machine learning model without communicating their local data. A key challenge in federated learning is to handle the heterogeneity of local data distribution across parties. Although many studies have been proposed to address this challenge, we find that they fail to achieve high performance in image datasets with deep learning models. In this paper, we propose MOON: model-contrastive federated learning. MOON is a simple and effective federated learning framework. The key idea of MOON is to utilize the similarity between model representations to correct the local training of individual parties, i.e., conducting contrastive learning in model-level. Our extensive experiments show that MOON significantly outperforms the other state-of-the-art federated learning algorithms on various image classification tasks.
In recent years, mobile devices have gained increasingly development with stronger computation capability and larger storage. Some of the computation-intensive machine learning and deep learning tasks can now be run on mobile devices. To take advantage of the resources available on mobile devices and preserve users' privacy, the idea of mobile distributed machine learning is proposed. It uses local hardware resources and local data to solve machine learning sub-problems on mobile devices, and only uploads computation results instead of original data to contribute to the optimization of the global model. This architecture can not only relieve computation and storage burden on servers, but also protect the users' sensitive information. Another benefit is the bandwidth reduction, as various kinds of local data can now participate in the training process without being uploaded to the server. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey on recent studies of mobile distributed machine learning. We survey a number of widely-used mobile distributed machine learning methods. We also present an in-depth discussion on the challenges and future directions in this area. We believe that this survey can demonstrate a clear overview of mobile distributed machine learning and provide guidelines on applying mobile distributed machine learning to real applications.