Split Learning (SL) is one promising variant of Federated Learning (FL), where the AI model is split and trained at the clients and the server collaboratively. By offloading the computation-intensive portions to the server, SL enables efficient model training on resource-constrained clients. Despite its booming applications, SL still lacks rigorous convergence analysis on non-IID data, which is critical for hyperparameter selection. In this paper, we first prove that SL exhibits an $\mathcal{O}(1/\sqrt{R})$ convergence rate for non-convex objectives on non-IID data, where $R$ is the number of total training rounds. The derived convergence results can facilitate understanding the effect of some crucial factors in SL (e.g., data heterogeneity and synchronization interval). Furthermore, comparing with the convergence result of FL, we show that the guarantee of SL is worse than FL in terms of training rounds on non-IID data. The experimental results verify our theory. More findings on the comparison between FL and SL in cross-device settings are also reported.
Bilevel optimization has been applied to a wide variety of machine learning models, and numerous stochastic bilevel optimization algorithms have been developed in recent years. However, most existing algorithms restrict their focus on the single-machine setting so that they are incapable of handling the distributed data. To address this issue, under the setting where all participants compose a network and perform peer-to-peer communication in this network, we developed two novel decentralized stochastic bilevel optimization algorithms based on the gradient tracking communication mechanism and two different gradient estimators. Additionally, we established their convergence rates for nonconvex-strongly-convex problems with novel theoretical analysis strategies. To our knowledge, this is the first work achieving these theoretical results. Finally, we applied our algorithms to practical machine learning models, and the experimental results confirmed the efficacy of our algorithms.
In this work we present a rather general approach to approximate the solutions of nonlocal conservation laws. In a first step, we approximate the nonlocal term with an appropriate quadrature rule applied to the spatial discretization. Then, we apply a numerical flux function on the reduced problem. We present explicit conditions which such a numerical flux function needs to fulfill. These conditions guarantee the convergence to the weak entropy solution of the considered model class. Numerical examples validate our theoretical results and demonstrate that the approach can be applied to other nonlocal problems.
Federated learning (FL) refers to a distributed machine learning framework involving learning from several decentralized edge clients without sharing local dataset. This distributed strategy prevents data leakage and enables on-device training as it updates the global model based on the local model updates. Despite offering several advantages, including data privacy and scalability, FL poses challenges such as statistical and system heterogeneity of data in federated networks, communication bottlenecks, privacy and security issues. This survey contains a systematic summarization of previous work, studies, and experiments on FL and presents a list of possibilities for FL across a range of applications and use cases. Other than that, various challenges of implementing FL and promising directions revolving around the corresponding challenges are provided.
Advancements in wearable medical devices in IoT technology are shaping the modern healthcare system. With the emergence of the Internet of Healthcare Things (IoHT), we are witnessing how efficient healthcare services are provided to patients and how healthcare professionals are effectively used AI-based models to analyze the data collected from IoHT devices for the treatment of various diseases. To avoid privacy breaches, these data must be processed and analyzed in compliance with the legal rules and regulations such as HIPAA and GDPR. Federated learning is a machine leaning based approach that allows multiple entities to collaboratively train a ML model without sharing their data. This is particularly useful in the healthcare domain where data privacy and security are big concerns. Even though FL addresses some privacy concerns, there is still no formal proof of privacy guarantees for IoHT data. Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) are a set of tools and techniques that are designed to enhance the privacy and security of online communications and data sharing. PETs provide a range of features that help protect users' personal information and sensitive data from unauthorized access and tracking. This paper reviews PETs in detail and comprehensively in relation to FL in the IoHT setting and identifies several key challenges for future research.
Existing analysis of AdaGrad and other adaptive methods for smooth convex optimization is typically for functions with bounded domain diameter. In unconstrained problems, previous works guarantee an asymptotic convergence rate without an explicit constant factor that holds true for the entire function class. Furthermore, in the stochastic setting, only a modified version of AdaGrad, different from the one commonly used in practice, in which the latest gradient is not used to update the stepsize, has been analyzed. Our paper aims at bridging these gaps and developing a deeper understanding of AdaGrad and its variants in the standard setting of smooth convex functions as well as the more general setting of quasar convex functions. First, we demonstrate new techniques to explicitly bound the convergence rate of the vanilla AdaGrad for unconstrained problems in both deterministic and stochastic settings. Second, we propose a variant of AdaGrad for which we can show the convergence of the last iterate, instead of the average iterate. Finally, we give new accelerated adaptive algorithms and their convergence guarantee in the deterministic setting with explicit dependency on the problem parameters, improving upon the asymptotic rate shown in previous works.
Recently, there has been significant progress in understanding the convergence and generalization properties of gradient-based methods for training overparameterized learning models. However, many aspects including the role of small random initialization and how the various parameters of the model are coupled during gradient-based updates to facilitate good generalization remain largely mysterious. A series of recent papers have begun to study this role for non-convex formulations of symmetric Positive Semi-Definite (PSD) matrix sensing problems which involve reconstructing a low-rank PSD matrix from a few linear measurements. The underlying symmetry/PSDness is crucial to existing convergence and generalization guarantees for this problem. In this paper, we study a general overparameterized low-rank matrix sensing problem where one wishes to reconstruct an asymmetric rectangular low-rank matrix from a few linear measurements. We prove that an overparameterized model trained via factorized gradient descent converges to the low-rank matrix generating the measurements. We show that in this setting, factorized gradient descent enjoys two implicit properties: (1) coupling of the trajectory of gradient descent where the factors are coupled in various ways throughout the gradient update trajectory and (2) an algorithmic regularization property where the iterates show a propensity towards low-rank models despite the overparameterized nature of the factorized model. These two implicit properties in turn allow us to show that the gradient descent trajectory from small random initialization moves towards solutions that are both globally optimal and generalize well.
Adversarial training has been demonstrated to be the most effective approach to defend against adversarial attacks. However, existing adversarial training methods show apparent oscillations and overfitting issue in the training process, degrading the defense efficacy. In this work, we propose a novel framework, termed Parameter Interpolation based Adversarial Training (PIAT), that makes full use of the historical information during training. Specifically, at the end of each epoch, PIAT tunes the model parameters as the interpolation of the parameters of the previous and current epochs. Besides, we suggest to use the Normalized Mean Square Error (NMSE) to further improve the robustness by aligning the clean and adversarial examples. Compared with other regularization methods, NMSE focuses more on the relative magnitude of the logits rather than the absolute magnitude. Extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets and various networks show that our method could prominently improve the model robustness and reduce the generalization error. Moreover, our framework is general and could further boost the robust accuracy when combined with other adversarial training methods.
We investigate the convergence and convergence rate of stochastic training algorithms for Neural Networks (NNs) that have been inspired by Dropout (Hinton et al., 2012). With the goal of avoiding overfitting during training of NNs, dropout algorithms consist in practice of multiplying the weight matrices of a NN componentwise by independently drawn random matrices with $\{0, 1 \}$-valued entries during each iteration of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD). This paper presents a probability theoretical proof that for fully-connected NNs with differentiable, polynomially bounded activation functions, if we project the weights onto a compact set when using a dropout algorithm, then the weights of the NN converge to a unique stationary point of a projected system of Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs). After this general convergence guarantee, we go on to investigate the convergence rate of dropout. Firstly, we obtain generic sample complexity bounds for finding $\epsilon$-stationary points of smooth nonconvex functions using SGD with dropout that explicitly depend on the dropout probability. Secondly, we obtain an upper bound on the rate of convergence of Gradient Descent (GD) on the limiting ODEs of dropout algorithms for NNs with the shape of arborescences of arbitrary depth and with linear activation functions. The latter bound shows that for an algorithm such as Dropout or Dropconnect (Wan et al., 2013), the convergence rate can be impaired exponentially by the depth of the arborescence. In contrast, we experimentally observe no such dependence for wide NNs with just a few dropout layers. We also provide a heuristic argument for this observation. Our results suggest that there is a change of scale of the effect of the dropout probability in the convergence rate that depends on the relative size of the width of the NN compared to its depth.
Learning on big data brings success for artificial intelligence (AI), but the annotation and training costs are expensive. In future, learning on small data is one of the ultimate purposes of AI, which requires machines to recognize objectives and scenarios relying on small data as humans. A series of machine learning models is going on this way such as active learning, few-shot learning, deep clustering. However, there are few theoretical guarantees for their generalization performance. Moreover, most of their settings are passive, that is, the label distribution is explicitly controlled by one specified sampling scenario. This survey follows the agnostic active sampling under a PAC (Probably Approximately Correct) framework to analyze the generalization error and label complexity of learning on small data using a supervised and unsupervised fashion. With these theoretical analyses, we categorize the small data learning models from two geometric perspectives: the Euclidean and non-Euclidean (hyperbolic) mean representation, where their optimization solutions are also presented and discussed. Later, some potential learning scenarios that may benefit from small data learning are then summarized, and their potential learning scenarios are also analyzed. Finally, some challenging applications such as computer vision, natural language processing that may benefit from learning on small data are also surveyed.
Non-IID data present a tough challenge for federated learning. In this paper, we explore a novel idea of facilitating pairwise collaborations between clients with similar data. We propose FedAMP, a new method employing federated attentive message passing to facilitate similar clients to collaborate more. We establish the convergence of FedAMP for both convex and non-convex models, and propose a heuristic method to further improve the performance of FedAMP when clients adopt deep neural networks as personalized models. Our extensive experiments on benchmark data sets demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed methods.