Federated learning algorithms are developed both for efficiency reasons and to ensure the privacy and confidentiality of personal and business data, respectively. Despite no data being shared explicitly, recent studies showed that the mechanism could still leak sensitive information. Hence, secure aggregation is utilized in many real-world scenarios to prevent attribution to specific participants. In this paper, we focus on the quality of individual training datasets and show that such quality information could be inferred and attributed to specific participants even when secure aggregation is applied. Specifically, through a series of image recognition experiments, we infer the relative quality ordering of participants. Moreover, we apply the inferred quality information to detect misbehaviours, to stabilize training performance, and to measure the individual contributions of participants.
State-of-the-art federated learning algorithms such as FedAvg require carefully tuned stepsizes to achieve their best performance. The improvements proposed by existing adaptive federated methods involve tuning of additional hyperparameters such as momentum parameters, and consider adaptivity only in the server aggregation round, but not locally. These methods can be inefficient in many practical scenarios because they require excessive tuning of hyperparameters and do not capture local geometric information. In this work, we extend the recently proposed stochastic Polyak stepsize (SPS) to the federated learning setting, and propose new locally adaptive and nearly parameter-free distributed SPS variants (FedSPS and FedDecSPS). We prove that FedSPS converges linearly in strongly convex and sublinearly in convex settings when the interpolation condition (overparametrization) is satisfied, and converges to a neighborhood of the solution in the general case. We extend our proposed method to a decreasing stepsize version FedDecSPS, that converges also when the interpolation condition does not hold. We validate our theoretical claims by performing illustrative convex experiments. Our proposed algorithms match the optimization performance of FedAvg with the best tuned hyperparameters in the i.i.d. case, and outperform FedAvg in the non-i.i.d. case.
In the last decade, Federated Learning (FL) has gained relevance in training collaborative models without sharing sensitive data. Since its birth, Centralized FL (CFL) has been the most common approach in the literature, where a central entity creates a global model. However, a centralized approach leads to increased latency due to bottlenecks, heightened vulnerability to system failures, and trustworthiness concerns affecting the entity responsible for the global model creation. Decentralized Federated Learning (DFL) emerged to address these concerns by promoting decentralized model aggregation and minimizing reliance on centralized architectures. However, despite the work done in DFL, the literature has not (i) studied the main aspects differentiating DFL and CFL; (ii) analyzed DFL frameworks to create and evaluate new solutions; and (iii) reviewed application scenarios using DFL. Thus, this article identifies and analyzes the main fundamentals of DFL in terms of federation architectures, topologies, communication mechanisms, security approaches, and key performance indicators. Additionally, the paper at hand explores existing mechanisms to optimize critical DFL fundamentals. Then, the most relevant features of the current DFL frameworks are reviewed and compared. After that, it analyzes the most used DFL application scenarios, identifying solutions based on the fundamentals and frameworks previously defined. Finally, the evolution of existing DFL solutions is studied to provide a list of trends, lessons learned, and open challenges.
Autism, also known as Autism Spectrum Disorder (or ASD), is a neurological disorder. Its main symptoms include difficulty in (verbal and/or non-verbal) communication, and rigid/repetitive behavior. These symptoms are often indistinguishable from a normal (control) individual, due to which this disorder remains undiagnosed in early childhood leading to delayed treatment. Since the learning curve is steep during the initial age, an early diagnosis of autism could allow to take adequate interventions at the right time, which might positively affect the growth of an autistic child. Further, the traditional methods of autism diagnosis require multiple visits to a specialized psychiatrist, however this process can be time-consuming. In this paper, we present a learning based approach to automate autism diagnosis using simple and small action video clips of subjects. This task is particularly challenging because the amount of annotated data available is small, and the variations among samples from the two categories (ASD and control) are generally indistinguishable. This is also evident from poor performance of a binary classifier learned using the cross-entropy loss on top of a baseline encoder. To address this, we adopt contrastive feature learning in both self supervised and supervised learning frameworks, and show that these can lead to a significant increase in the prediction accuracy of a binary classifier on this task. We further validate this by conducting thorough experimental analyses under different set-ups on two publicly available datasets.
As digital transformation continues, enterprises are generating, managing, and storing vast amounts of data, while artificial intelligence technology is rapidly advancing. However, it brings challenges in information security and data security. Data security refers to the protection of digital information from unauthorized access, damage, theft, etc. throughout its entire life cycle. With the promulgation and implementation of data security laws and the emphasis on data security and data privacy by organizations and users, Privacy-preserving technology represented by federated learning has a wide range of application scenarios. Federated learning is a distributed machine learning computing framework that allows multiple subjects to train joint models without sharing data to protect data privacy and solve the problem of data islands. However, the data among multiple subjects are independent of each other, and the data differences in quality may cause fairness issues in federated learning modeling, such as data bias among multiple subjects, resulting in biased and discriminatory models. Therefore, we propose DBFed, a debiasing federated learning framework based on domain-independent, which mitigates model bias by explicitly encoding sensitive attributes during client-side training. This paper conducts experiments on three real datasets and uses five evaluation metrics of accuracy and fairness to quantify the effect of the model. Most metrics of DBFed exceed those of the other three comparative methods, fully demonstrating the debiasing effect of DBFed.
The existence of representative datasets is a prerequisite of many successful artificial intelligence and machine learning models. However, the subsequent application of these models often involves scenarios that are inadequately represented in the data used for training. The reasons for this are manifold and range from time and cost constraints to ethical considerations. As a consequence, the reliable use of these models, especially in safety-critical applications, is a huge challenge. Leveraging additional, already existing sources of knowledge is key to overcome the limitations of purely data-driven approaches, and eventually to increase the generalization capability of these models. Furthermore, predictions that conform with knowledge are crucial for making trustworthy and safe decisions even in underrepresented scenarios. This work provides an overview of existing techniques and methods in the literature that combine data-based models with existing knowledge. The identified approaches are structured according to the categories integration, extraction and conformity. Special attention is given to applications in the field of autonomous driving.
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.
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.
The growing energy and performance costs of deep learning have driven the community to reduce the size of neural networks by selectively pruning components. Similarly to their biological counterparts, sparse networks generalize just as well, if not better than, the original dense networks. Sparsity can reduce the memory footprint of regular networks to fit mobile devices, as well as shorten training time for ever growing networks. In this paper, we survey prior work on sparsity in deep learning and provide an extensive tutorial of sparsification for both inference and training. We describe approaches to remove and add elements of neural networks, different training strategies to achieve model sparsity, and mechanisms to exploit sparsity in practice. Our work distills ideas from more than 300 research papers and provides guidance to practitioners who wish to utilize sparsity today, as well as to researchers whose goal is to push the frontier forward. We include the necessary background on mathematical methods in sparsification, describe phenomena such as early structure adaptation, the intricate relations between sparsity and the training process, and show techniques for achieving acceleration on real hardware. We also define a metric of pruned parameter efficiency that could serve as a baseline for comparison of different sparse networks. We close by speculating on how sparsity can improve future workloads and outline major open problems in the field.
As data are increasingly being stored in different silos and societies becoming more aware of data privacy issues, the traditional centralized training of artificial intelligence (AI) models is facing efficiency and privacy challenges. Recently, federated learning (FL) has emerged as an alternative solution and continue to thrive in this new reality. Existing FL protocol design has been shown to be vulnerable to adversaries within or outside of the system, compromising data privacy and system robustness. Besides training powerful global models, it is of paramount importance to design FL systems that have privacy guarantees and are resistant to different types of adversaries. In this paper, we conduct the first comprehensive survey on this topic. Through a concise introduction to the concept of FL, and a unique taxonomy covering: 1) threat models; 2) poisoning attacks and defenses against robustness; 3) inference attacks and defenses against privacy, we provide an accessible review of this important topic. We highlight the intuitions, key techniques as well as fundamental assumptions adopted by various attacks and defenses. Finally, we discuss promising future research directions towards robust and privacy-preserving federated learning.
Detection and recognition of text in natural images are two main problems in the field of computer vision that have a wide variety of applications in analysis of sports videos, autonomous driving, industrial automation, to name a few. They face common challenging problems that are factors in how text is represented and affected by several environmental conditions. The current state-of-the-art scene text detection and/or recognition methods have exploited the witnessed advancement in deep learning architectures and reported a superior accuracy on benchmark datasets when tackling multi-resolution and multi-oriented text. However, there are still several remaining challenges affecting text in the wild images that cause existing methods to underperform due to there models are not able to generalize to unseen data and the insufficient labeled data. Thus, unlike previous surveys in this field, the objectives of this survey are as follows: first, offering the reader not only a review on the recent advancement in scene text detection and recognition, but also presenting the results of conducting extensive experiments using a unified evaluation framework that assesses pre-trained models of the selected methods on challenging cases, and applies the same evaluation criteria on these techniques. Second, identifying several existing challenges for detecting or recognizing text in the wild images, namely, in-plane-rotation, multi-oriented and multi-resolution text, perspective distortion, illumination reflection, partial occlusion, complex fonts, and special characters. Finally, the paper also presents insight into the potential research directions in this field to address some of the mentioned challenges that are still encountering scene text detection and recognition techniques.