In this paper, a new communication-efficient federated learning (FL) framework is proposed, inspired by vector quantized compressed sensing. The basic strategy of the proposed framework is to compress the local model update at each device by applying dimensionality reduction followed by vector quantization. Subsequently, the global model update is reconstructed at a parameter server (PS) by applying a sparse signal recovery algorithm to the aggregation of the compressed local model updates. By harnessing the benefits of both dimensionality reduction and vector quantization, the proposed framework effectively reduces the communication overhead of local update transmissions. Both the design of the vector quantizer and the key parameters for the compression are optimized so as to minimize the reconstruction error of the global model update under the constraint of wireless link capacity. By considering the reconstruction error, the convergence rate of the proposed framework is also analyzed for a smooth loss function. Simulation results on the MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework provides more than a 2.5% increase in classification accuracy compared to state-of-art FL frameworks when the communication overhead of the local model update transmission is less than 0.1 bit per local model entry.
Network compression is crucial to making the deep networks to be more efficient, faster, and generalizable to low-end hardware. Current network compression methods have two open problems: first, there lacks a theoretical framework to estimate the maximum compression rate; second, some layers may get over-prunned, resulting in significant network performance drop. To solve these two problems, this study propose a gradient-matrix singularity analysis-based method to estimate the maximum network redundancy. Guided by that maximum rate, a novel and efficient hierarchical network pruning algorithm is developed to maximally condense the neuronal network structure without sacrificing network performance. Substantial experiments are performed to demonstrate the efficacy of the new method for pruning several advanced convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures. Compared to existing pruning methods, the proposed pruning algorithm achieved state-of-the-art performance. At the same or similar compression ratio, the new method provided the highest network prediction accuracy as compared to other methods.
To investigate the heterogeneity of federated learning in real-world scenarios, we generalize the classical federated learning to federated hetero-task learning, which emphasizes the inconsistency across the participants in federated learning in terms of both data distribution and learning tasks. We also present B-FHTL, a federated hetero-task learning benchmark consisted of simulation dataset, FL protocols and a unified evaluation mechanism. B-FHTL dataset contains three well-designed federated learning tasks with increasing heterogeneity. Each task simulates the clients with different data distributions and learning tasks. To ensure fair comparison among different FL algorithms, B-FHTL builds in a full suite of FL protocols by providing high-level APIs to avoid privacy leakage, and presets most common evaluation metrics spanning across different learning tasks, such as regression, classification, text generation and etc. Furthermore, we compare the FL algorithms in fields of federated multi-task learning, federated personalization and federated meta learning within B-FHTL, and highlight the influence of heterogeneity and difficulties of federated hetero-task learning. Our benchmark, including the federated dataset, protocols, the evaluation mechanism and the preliminary experiment, is open-sourced at //github.com/alibaba/FederatedScope/tree/contest/v1.0.
Non-rigid registration, which deforms a source shape in a non-rigid way to align with a target shape, is a classical problem in computer vision. Such problems can be challenging because of imperfect data (noise, outliers and partial overlap) and high degrees of freedom. Existing methods typically adopt the $\ell_{p}$ type robust norm to measure the alignment error and regularize the smoothness of deformation, and use a proximal algorithm to solve the resulting non-smooth optimization problem. However, the slow convergence of such algorithms limits their wide applications. In this paper, we propose a formulation for robust non-rigid registration based on a globally smooth robust norm for alignment and regularization, which can effectively handle outliers and partial overlaps. The problem is solved using the majorization-minimization algorithm, which reduces each iteration to a convex quadratic problem with a closed-form solution. We further apply Anderson acceleration to speed up the convergence of the solver, enabling the solver to run efficiently on devices with limited compute capability. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for non-rigid alignment between two shapes with outliers and partial overlaps, with quantitative evaluation showing that it outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of registration accuracy and computational speed. The source code is available at //github.com/yaoyx689/AMM_NRR.
Federated learning is a type of collaborative machine learning, where participating clients process their data locally, sharing only updates to the collaborative model. This enables to build privacy-aware distributed machine learning models, among others. The goal is the optimization of a statistical model's parameters by minimizing a cost function of a collection of datasets which are stored locally by a set of clients. This process exposes the clients to two issues: leakage of private information and lack of personalization of the model. On the other hand, with the recent advancements in techniques to analyze data, there is a surge of concern for the privacy violation of the participating clients. To mitigate this, differential privacy and its variants serve as a standard for providing formal privacy guarantees. Often the clients represent very heterogeneous communities and hold data which are very diverse. Therefore, aligned with the recent focus of the FL community to build a framework of personalized models for the users representing their diversity, it is also of utmost importance to protect against potential threats against the sensitive and personal information of the clients. $d$-privacy, which is a generalization of geo-indistinguishability, the lately popularized paradigm of location privacy, uses a metric-based obfuscation technique that preserves the spatial distribution of the original data. To address the issue of protecting the privacy of the clients and allowing for personalized model training to enhance the fairness and utility of the system, we propose a method to provide group privacy guarantees exploiting some key properties of $d$-privacy which enables personalized models under the framework of FL. We provide with theoretical justifications to the applicability and experimental validation on real-world datasets to illustrate the working of the proposed method.
This letter studies a vertical federated edge learning (FEEL) system for collaborative objects/human motion recognition by exploiting the distributed integrated sensing and communication (ISAC). In this system, distributed edge devices first send wireless signals to sense targeted objects/human, and then exchange intermediate computed vectors (instead of raw sensing data) for collaborative recognition while preserving data privacy. To boost the spectrum and hardware utilization efficiency for FEEL, we exploit ISAC for both target sensing and data exchange, by employing dedicated frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) signals at each edge device. Under this setup, we propose a vertical FEEL framework for realizing the recognition based on the collected multi-view wireless sensing data. In this framework, each edge device owns an individual local L-model to transform its sensing data into an intermediate vector with relatively low dimensions, which is then transmitted to a coordinating edge device for final output via a common downstream S-model. By considering a human motion recognition task, experimental results show that our vertical FEEL based approach achieves recognition accuracy up to 98\% with an improvement up to 8\% compared to the benchmarks, including on-device training and horizontal FEEL.
In this paper, we consider distributed optimization problems where $n$ agents, each possessing a local cost function, collaboratively minimize the average of the local cost functions over a connected network. To solve the problem, we propose a distributed random reshuffling (D-RR) algorithm that invokes the random reshuffling (RR) update in each agent. We show that D-RR inherits favorable characteristics of RR for both smooth strongly convex and smooth nonconvex objective functions. In particular, for smooth strongly convex objective functions, D-RR achieves $\mathcal{O}(1/T^2)$ rate of convergence (where $T$ counts epoch number) in terms of the squared distance between the iterate and the global minimizer. When the objective function is assumed to be smooth nonconvex and has Lipschitz continuous component functions, we show that D-RR drives the squared norm of gradient to $0$ at a rate of $\mathcal{O}(1/T^{2/3})$. These convergence results match those of centralized RR (up to constant factors) and outperform the distributed stochastic gradient descent (DSGD) algorithm if we run a relatively large number of epochs. Finally, we conduct a set of numerical experiments to illustrate the efficiency of the proposed D-RR method on both strongly convex and nonconvex distributed optimization problems.
This paper provides a variational analysis of the unconstrained formulation of the LASSO problem, ubiquitous in statistical learning, signal processing, and inverse problems. In particular, we establish smoothness results for the optimal value as well as Lipschitz properties of the optimal solution as functions of the right-hand side (or measurement vector) and the regularization parameter. Moreover, we show how to apply the proposed variational analysis to study the sensitivity of the optimal solution to the tuning parameter in the context of compressed sensing with subgaussian measurements. Our theoretical findings are validated by numerical experiments.
Extreme compression, particularly ultra-low bit precision (binary/ternary) quantization, has been proposed to fit large NLP models on resource-constraint devices. However, to preserve the accuracy for such aggressive compression schemes, cutting-edge methods usually introduce complicated compression pipelines, e.g., multi-stage expensive knowledge distillation with extensive hyperparameter tuning. Also, they oftentimes focus less on smaller transformer models that have already been heavily compressed via knowledge distillation and lack a systematic study to show the effectiveness of their methods. In this paper, we perform a very comprehensive systematic study to measure the impact of many key hyperparameters and training strategies from previous works. As a result, we find out that previous baselines for ultra-low bit precision quantization are significantly under-trained. Based on our study, we propose a simple yet effective compression pipeline for extreme compression, named XTC. XTC demonstrates that (1) we can skip the pre-training knowledge distillation to obtain a 5-layer BERT while achieving better performance than previous state-of-the-art methods, e.g., the 6-layer TinyBERT; (2) extreme quantization plus layer reduction is able to reduce the model size by 50x, resulting in new state-of-the-art results on GLUE tasks.
Remote sensing (RS) images are usually stored in compressed format to reduce the storage size of the archives. Thus, existing content-based image retrieval (CBIR) systems in RS require decoding images before applying CBIR (which is computationally demanding in the case of large-scale CBIR problems). To address this problem, in this paper, we present a joint framework that simultaneously learns RS image compression and indexing. Thus, it eliminates the need for decoding RS images before applying CBIR. The proposed framework is made up of two modules. The first module compresses RS images based on an auto-encoder architecture. The second module produces hash codes with a high discrimination capability by employing soft pairwise, bit-balancing and classification loss functions. We also introduce a two stage learning strategy with gradient manipulation techniques to obtain image representations that are compatible with both RS image indexing and compression. Experimental results show the efficacy of the proposed framework when compared to widely used approaches in RS. The code of the proposed framework is available at //git.tu-berlin.de/rsim/RS-JCIF.
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.