Jamming signals can jeopardize the operation of GNSS receivers until denying its operation. Given their ubiquity, jamming mitigation and localization techniques are of crucial importance, for which jammer classification is of help. Data-driven models have been proven useful in detecting these threats, while their training using crowdsourced data still poses challenges when it comes to private data sharing. This article investigates the use of federated learning to train jamming signal classifiers locally on each device, with model updates aggregated and averaged at the central server. This allows for privacy-preserving training procedures that do not require centralized data storage or access to client local data. The used framework FedAvg is assessed on a dataset consisting of spectrogram images of simulated interfered GNSS signal. Six different jammer types are effectively classified with comparable results to a fully centralized solution that requires vast amounts of data communication and involves privacy-preserving concerns.
As a privacy-preserving paradigm for training Machine Learning (ML) models, Federated Learning (FL) has received tremendous attention from both industry and academia. In a typical FL scenario, clients exhibit significant heterogeneity in terms of data distribution and hardware configurations. Thus, randomly sampling clients in each training round may not fully exploit the local updates from heterogeneous clients, resulting in lower model accuracy, slower convergence rate, degraded fairness, etc. To tackle the FL client heterogeneity problem, various client selection algorithms have been developed, showing promising performance improvement. In this paper, we systematically present recent advances in the emerging field of FL client selection and its challenges and research opportunities. We hope to facilitate practitioners in choosing the most suitable client selection mechanisms for their applications, as well as inspire researchers and newcomers to better understand this exciting research topic.
Federated learning (FL), training deep models from decentralized data without privacy leakage, has shown great potential in medical image computing recently. However, considering the ubiquitous class imbalance in medical data, FL can exhibit performance degradation, especially for minority classes (e.g. rare diseases). Existing methods towards this problem mainly focus on training a balanced classifier to eliminate class prior bias among classes, but neglect to explore better representation to facilitate classification performance. In this paper, we present a privacy-preserving FL method named FedIIC to combat class imbalance from two perspectives: feature learning and classifier learning. In feature learning, two levels of contrastive learning are designed to extract better class-specific features with imbalanced data in FL. In classifier learning, per-class margins are dynamically set according to real-time difficulty and class priors, which helps the model learn classes equally. Experimental results on publicly-available datasets demonstrate the superior performance of FedIIC in dealing with both real-world and simulated multi-source medical imaging data under class imbalance. Code is available at //github.com/wnn2000/FedIIC.
Federated learning has gained popularity for distributed learning without aggregating sensitive data from clients. But meanwhile, the distributed and isolated nature of data isolation may be complicated by data quality, making it more vulnerable to noisy labels. Many efforts exist to defend against the negative impacts of noisy labels in centralized or federated settings. However, there is a lack of a benchmark that comprehensively considers the impact of noisy labels in a wide variety of typical FL settings. In this work, we serve the first standardized benchmark that can help researchers fully explore potential federated noisy settings. Also, we conduct comprehensive experiments to explore the characteristics of these data settings and unravel challenging scenarios on the federated noisy label learning, which may guide method development in the future. We highlight the 20 basic settings for more than 5 datasets proposed in our benchmark and standardized simulation pipeline for federated noisy label learning. We hope this benchmark can facilitate idea verification in federated learning with noisy labels. \texttt{FedNoisy} is available at \codeword{//github.com/SMILELab-FL/FedNoisy}.
In Federated Learning (FL), a number of clients or devices collaborate to train a model without sharing their data. Models are optimized locally at each client and further communicated to a central hub for aggregation. While FL is an appealing decentralized training paradigm, heterogeneity among data from different clients can cause the local optimization to drift away from the global objective. In order to estimate and therefore remove this drift, variance reduction techniques have been incorporated into FL optimization recently. However, these approaches inaccurately estimate the clients' drift and ultimately fail to remove it properly. In this work, we propose an adaptive algorithm that accurately estimates drift across clients. In comparison to previous works, our approach necessitates less storage and communication bandwidth, as well as lower compute costs. Additionally, our proposed methodology induces stability by constraining the norm of estimates for client drift, making it more practical for large scale FL. Experimental findings demonstrate that the proposed algorithm converges significantly faster and achieves higher accuracy than the baselines across various FL benchmarks.
Despite recent progress in enhancing the privacy of federated learning (FL) via differential privacy (DP), the trade-off of DP between privacy protection and performance is still underexplored for real-world medical scenario. In this paper, we propose to optimize the trade-off under the context of client-level DP, which focuses on privacy during communications. However, FL for medical imaging involves typically much fewer participants (hospitals) than other domains (e.g., mobile devices), thus ensuring clients be differentially private is much more challenging. To tackle this problem, we propose an adaptive intermediary strategy to improve performance without harming privacy. Specifically, we theoretically find splitting clients into sub-clients, which serve as intermediaries between hospitals and the server, can mitigate the noises introduced by DP without harming privacy. Our proposed approach is empirically evaluated on both classification and segmentation tasks using two public datasets, and its effectiveness is demonstrated with significant performance improvements and comprehensive analytical studies. Code is available at: //github.com/med-air/Client-DP-FL.
With the continuous development of deep learning in the field of image generation models, a large number of vivid forged faces have been generated and spread on the Internet. These high-authenticity artifacts could grow into a threat to society security. Existing face forgery detection methods directly utilize the obtained public shared or centralized data for training but ignore the personal privacy and security issues when personal data couldn't be centralizedly shared in real-world scenarios. Additionally, different distributions caused by diverse artifact types would further bring adverse influences on the forgery detection task. To solve the mentioned problems, the paper proposes a novel generalized residual Federated learning for face Forgery detection (FedForgery). The designed variational autoencoder aims to learn robust discriminative residual feature maps to detect forgery faces (with diverse or even unknown artifact types). Furthermore, the general federated learning strategy is introduced to construct distributed detection model trained collaboratively with multiple local decentralized devices, which could further boost the representation generalization. Experiments conducted on publicly available face forgery detection datasets prove the superior performance of the proposed FedForgery. The designed novel generalized face forgery detection protocols and source code would be publicly available.
Federated learning (FL) has been proposed to protect data privacy and virtually assemble the isolated data silos by cooperatively training models among organizations without breaching privacy and security. However, FL faces heterogeneity from various aspects, including data space, statistical, and system heterogeneity. For example, collaborative organizations without conflict of interest often come from different areas and have heterogeneous data from different feature spaces. Participants may also want to train heterogeneous personalized local models due to non-IID and imbalanced data distribution and various resource-constrained devices. Therefore, heterogeneous FL is proposed to address the problem of heterogeneity in FL. In this survey, we comprehensively investigate the domain of heterogeneous FL in terms of data space, statistical, system, and model heterogeneity. We first give an overview of FL, including its definition and categorization. Then, We propose a precise taxonomy of heterogeneous FL settings for each type of heterogeneity according to the problem setting and learning objective. We also investigate the transfer learning methodologies to tackle the heterogeneity in FL. We further present the applications of heterogeneous FL. Finally, we highlight the challenges and opportunities and envision promising future research directions toward new framework design and trustworthy approaches.
Federated Learning aims to learn machine learning models from multiple decentralized edge devices (e.g. mobiles) or servers without sacrificing local data privacy. Recent Natural Language Processing techniques rely on deep learning and large pre-trained language models. However, both big deep neural and language models are trained with huge amounts of data which often lies on the server side. Since text data is widely originated from end users, in this work, we look into recent NLP models and techniques which use federated learning as the learning framework. Our survey discusses major challenges in federated natural language processing, including the algorithm challenges, system challenges as well as the privacy issues. We also provide a critical review of the existing Federated NLP evaluation methods and tools. Finally, we highlight the current research gaps and future directions.
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.
The demand for artificial intelligence has grown significantly over the last decade and this growth has been fueled by advances in machine learning techniques and the ability to leverage hardware acceleration. However, in order to increase the quality of predictions and render machine learning solutions feasible for more complex applications, a substantial amount of training data is required. Although small machine learning models can be trained with modest amounts of data, the input for training larger models such as neural networks grows exponentially with the number of parameters. Since the demand for processing training data has outpaced the increase in computation power of computing machinery, there is a need for distributing the machine learning workload across multiple machines, and turning the centralized into a distributed system. These distributed systems present new challenges, first and foremost the efficient parallelization of the training process and the creation of a coherent model. This article provides an extensive overview of the current state-of-the-art in the field by outlining the challenges and opportunities of distributed machine learning over conventional (centralized) machine learning, discussing the techniques used for distributed machine learning, and providing an overview of the systems that are available.