Privacy, security and data governance constraints rule out a brute force process in the integration of cross-silo data, which inherits the development of the Internet of Things. Federated learning is proposed to ensure that all parties can collaboratively complete the training task while the data is not out of the local. Vertical federated learning is a specialization of federated learning for distributed features. To preserve privacy, homomorphic encryption is applied to enable encrypted operations without decryption. Nevertheless, together with a robust security guarantee, homomorphic encryption brings extra communication and computation overhead. In this paper, we analyze the current bottlenecks of vertical federated learning under homomorphic encryption comprehensively and numerically. We propose a straggler-resilient and computation-efficient accelerating system that reduces the communication overhead in heterogeneous scenarios by 65.26% at most and reduces the computation overhead caused by homomorphic encryption by 40.66% at most. Our system can improve the robustness and efficiency of the current vertical federated learning framework without loss of security.
With high levels of intermittent power generation and dynamic demand patterns, accurate forecasts for residential loads have become essential. Smart meters can play an important role when making these forecasts as they provide detailed load data. However, using smart meter data for load forecasting is challenging due to data privacy requirements. This paper investigates how these requirements can be addressed through a combination of federated learning and privacy preserving techniques such as differential privacy and secure aggregation. For our analysis, we employ a large set of residential load data and simulate how different federated learning models and privacy preserving techniques affect performance and privacy. Our simulations reveal that combining federated learning and privacy preserving techniques can secure both high forecasting accuracy and near-complete privacy. Specifically, we find that such combinations enable a high level of information sharing while ensuring privacy of both the processed load data and forecasting models. Moreover, we identify and discuss challenges of applying federated learning, differential privacy and secure aggregation for residential short-term load forecasting.
Conventional frequentist FL schemes are known to yield overconfident decisions. Bayesian FL addresses this issue by allowing agents to process and exchange uncertainty information encoded in distributions over the model parameters. However, this comes at the cost of a larger per-iteration communication overhead. This letter investigates whether Bayesian FL can still provide advantages in terms of calibration when constraining communication bandwidth. We present compressed particle-based Bayesian FL protocols for FL and federated "unlearning" that apply quantization and sparsification across multiple particles. The experimental results confirm that the benefits of Bayesian FL are robust to bandwidth constraints.
Federated learning, where algorithms are trained across multiple decentralized devices without sharing local data, is increasingly popular in distributed machine learning practice. Typically, a graph structure $G$ exists behind local devices for communication. In this work, we consider parameter estimation in federated learning with data distribution and communication heterogeneity, as well as limited computational capacity of local devices. We encode the distribution heterogeneity by parametrizing distributions on local devices with a set of distinct $p$-dimensional vectors. We then propose to jointly estimate parameters of all devices under the $M$-estimation framework with the fused Lasso regularization, encouraging an equal estimate of parameters on connected devices in $G$. We provide a general result for our estimator depending on $G$, which can be further calibrated to obtain convergence rates for various specific problem setups. Surprisingly, our estimator attains the optimal rate under certain graph fidelity condition on $G$, as if we could aggregate all samples sharing the same distribution. If the graph fidelity condition is not met, we propose an edge selection procedure via multiple testing to ensure the optimality. To ease the burden of local computation, a decentralized stochastic version of ADMM is provided, with convergence rate $O(T^{-1}\log T)$ where $T$ denotes the number of iterations. We highlight that, our algorithm transmits only parameters along edges of $G$ at each iteration, without requiring a central machine, which preserves privacy. We further extend it to the case where devices are randomly inaccessible during the training process, with a similar algorithmic convergence guarantee. The computational and statistical efficiency of our method is evidenced by simulation experiments and the 2020 US presidential election data set.
Outlier detection (OD) is a key learning task for finding rare and deviant data samples, with many time-critical applications such as fraud detection and intrusion detection. In this work, we propose TOD, the first tensor-based system for efficient and scalable outlier detection on distributed multi-GPU machines. A key idea behind TOD is decomposing complex OD applications into a small collection of basic tensor algebra operators. This decomposition enables TOD to accelerate OD computations by leveraging recent advances in deep learning infrastructure in both hardware and software. Moreover, to deploy memory-intensive OD applications on modern GPUs with limited on-device memory, we introduce two key techniques. First, provable quantization speeds up OD computations and reduces its memory footprint by automatically performing specific floating-point operations in lower precision while provably guaranteeing no accuracy loss. Second, to exploit the aggregated compute resources and memory capacity of multiple GPUs, we introduce automatic batching, which decomposes OD computations into small batches for both sequential execution on a single GPU and parallel execution on multiple GPUs. TOD supports a diverse set of OD algorithms. Extensive evaluation on 11 real and 3 synthetic OD datasets shows that TOD is on average 10.9x faster than the leading CPU-based OD system PyOD (with a maximum speedup of 38.9x), and can handle much larger datasets than existing GPU-based OD systems. In addition, TOD allows easy integration of new OD operators, enabling fast prototyping of emerging and yet-to-discovered OD algorithms.
Various cryptographic techniques are used in outsourced database systems to ensure data privacy while allowing for efficient querying. This work proposes a definition and components of a new secure and efficient outsourced database system, which answers various types of queries, with different privacy guarantees in different security models. This work starts with the survey of five order-revealing encryption schemes that can be used directly in many database indices and five range query protocols with various security / efficiency tradeoffs. The survey systematizes the state-of-the-art range query solutions in a snapshot adversary setting and offers some non-obvious observations regarding the efficiency of the constructions. In $\mathcal{E}\text{psolute}$, a secure range query engine, security is achieved in a setting with a much stronger adversary where she can continuously observe everything on the server, and leaking even the result size can enable a reconstruction attack. $\mathcal{E}\text{psolute}$ proposes a definition, construction, analysis, and experimental evaluation of a system that provably hides both access pattern and communication volume while remaining efficient. The work concludes with $k\text{-a}n\text{o}n$ -- a secure similarity search engine in a snapshot adversary model. The work presents a construction in which the security of $k\text{NN}$ queries is achieved similarly to OPE / ORE solutions -- encrypting the input with an approximate Distance Comparison Preserving Encryption scheme so that the inputs, the points in a hyperspace, are perturbed, but the query algorithm still produces accurate results. We use TREC datasets and queries for the search, and track the rank quality metrics such as MRR and nDCG. For the attacks, we build an LSTM model that trains on the correlation between a sentence and its embedding and then predicts words from the embedding.
Deep Q-learning Network (DQN) is a successful way which combines reinforcement learning with deep neural networks and leads to a widespread application of reinforcement learning. One challenging problem when applying DQN or other reinforcement learning algorithms to real world problem is data collection. Therefore, how to improve data efficiency is one of the most important problems in the research of reinforcement learning. In this paper, we propose a framework which uses the Max-Mean loss in Deep Q-Network (M$^2$DQN). Instead of sampling one batch of experiences in the training step, we sample several batches from the experience replay and update the parameters such that the maximum TD-error of these batches is minimized. The proposed method can be combined with most of existing techniques of DQN algorithm by replacing the loss function. We verify the effectiveness of this framework with one of the most widely used techniques, Double DQN (DDQN), in several gym games. The results show that our method leads to a substantial improvement in both the learning speed and performance.
Federated learning (FL) is one of the most appealing alternatives to the standard centralized learning paradigm, allowing heterogeneous set of devices to train a machine learning model without sharing their raw data. However, FL requires a central server to coordinate the learning process, thus introducing potential scalability and security issues. In the literature, server-less FL approaches like gossip federated learning (GFL) and blockchain-enabled federated learning (BFL) have been proposed to mitigate these issues. In this work, we propose a complete overview of these three techniques proposing a comparison according to an integral set of performance indicators, including model accuracy, time complexity, communication overhead, convergence time and energy consumption. An extensive simulation campaign permits to draw a quantitative analysis. In particular, GFL is able to save the 18% of training time, the 68% of energy and the 51% of data to be shared with respect to the CFL solution, but it is not able to reach the level of accuracy of CFL. On the other hand, BFL represents a viable solution for implementing decentralized learning with a higher level of security, at the cost of an extra energy usage and data sharing. Finally, we identify open issues on the two decentralized federated learning implementations and provide insights on potential extensions and possible research directions on this new research field.
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.
Federated Learning (FL) is a decentralized machine-learning paradigm, in which a global server iteratively averages the model parameters of local users without accessing their data. User heterogeneity has imposed significant challenges to FL, which can incur drifted global models that are slow to converge. Knowledge Distillation has recently emerged to tackle this issue, by refining the server model using aggregated knowledge from heterogeneous users, other than directly averaging their model parameters. This approach, however, depends on a proxy dataset, making it impractical unless such a prerequisite is satisfied. Moreover, the ensemble knowledge is not fully utilized to guide local model learning, which may in turn affect the quality of the aggregated model. Inspired by the prior art, we propose a data-free knowledge distillation} approach to address heterogeneous FL, where the server learns a lightweight generator to ensemble user information in a data-free manner, which is then broadcasted to users, regulating local training using the learned knowledge as an inductive bias. Empirical studies powered by theoretical implications show that, our approach facilitates FL with better generalization performance using fewer communication rounds, compared with the state-of-the-art.
Federated learning (FL) is an emerging, privacy-preserving machine learning paradigm, drawing tremendous attention in both academia and industry. A unique characteristic of FL is heterogeneity, which resides in the various hardware specifications and dynamic states across the participating devices. Theoretically, heterogeneity can exert a huge influence on the FL training process, e.g., causing a device unavailable for training or unable to upload its model updates. Unfortunately, these impacts have never been systematically studied and quantified in existing FL literature. In this paper, we carry out the first empirical study to characterize the impacts of heterogeneity in FL. We collect large-scale data from 136k smartphones that can faithfully reflect heterogeneity in real-world settings. We also build a heterogeneity-aware FL platform that complies with the standard FL protocol but with heterogeneity in consideration. Based on the data and the platform, we conduct extensive experiments to compare the performance of state-of-the-art FL algorithms under heterogeneity-aware and heterogeneity-unaware settings. Results show that heterogeneity causes non-trivial performance degradation in FL, including up to 9.2% accuracy drop, 2.32x lengthened training time, and undermined fairness. Furthermore, we analyze potential impact factors and find that device failure and participant bias are two potential factors for performance degradation. Our study provides insightful implications for FL practitioners. On the one hand, our findings suggest that FL algorithm designers consider necessary heterogeneity during the evaluation. On the other hand, our findings urge system providers to design specific mechanisms to mitigate the impacts of heterogeneity.