Federated learning (FL) literature typically assumes that each client has a fixed amount of data, which is unrealistic in many practical applications. Some recent works introduced a framework for online FL (Online-Fed) wherein clients perform model learning on streaming data and communicate the model to the server; however, they do not address the associated communication overhead. As a solution, this paper presents a partial-sharing-based online federated learning framework (PSO-Fed) that enables clients to update their local models using continuous streaming data and share only portions of those updated models with the server. During a global iteration of PSO-Fed, non-participant clients have the privilege to update their local models with new data. Here, we consider a global task of kernel regression, where clients use a random Fourier features-based kernel LMS on their data for local learning. We examine the mean convergence of the PSO-Fed for kernel regression. Experimental results show that PSO-Fed can achieve competitive performance with a significantly lower communication overhead than Online-Fed.
Federated Learning (FL) has been considered as an appealing framework to tackle data privacy issues of mobile devices compared to conventional Machine Learning (ML). Using Edge Servers (ESs) as intermediaries to perform model aggregation in proximity can reduce the transmission overhead, and it enables great potentials in low-latency FL, where the hierarchical architecture of FL (HFL) has been attracted more attention. Designing a proper client selection policy can significantly improve training performance, and it has been extensively used in FL studies. However, to the best of our knowledge, there are no studies focusing on HFL. In addition, client selection for HFL faces more challenges than conventional FL, e.g., the time-varying connection of client-ES pairs and the limited budget of the Network Operator (NO). In this paper, we investigate a client selection problem for HFL, where the NO learns the number of successful participating clients to improve the training performance (i.e., select as many clients in each round) as well as under the limited budget on each ES. An online policy, called Context-aware Online Client Selection (COCS), is developed based on Contextual Combinatorial Multi-Armed Bandit (CC-MAB). COCS observes the side-information (context) of local computing and transmission of client-ES pairs and makes client selection decisions to maximize NO's utility given a limited budget. Theoretically, COCS achieves a sublinear regret compared to an Oracle policy on both strongly convex and non-convex HFL. Simulation results also support the efficiency of the proposed COCS policy on real-world datasets.
Federated learning (FL) has emerged to jointly train a model with distributed data sets in IoT while avoiding the need for central data collection. Due to limited observation range, such data sets can only reflect local information, which limits the quality of trained models. In practical network, the global information and local observations always coexist, which requires joint consideration for learning to make reasonable policy. However, in horizontal FL among distributed clients, the central agency only acts as a model aggregator without utilizing its global features to further improve the model. This could largely degrade the performance in some missions such as flow prediction, where the global information could obviously enhance the accuracy. Meanwhile, such global feature may not be directly transmitted to agents for data security. Then how to utilize the global observation residing in the central agency while protecting its safety rises up as an important problem in FL. In this paper, we developed the vertical-horizontal federated learning (VHFL) process, where the global feature is shared with the agents in a procedure similar to vertical FL without extra communication rounds. Considering the delay and packet loss, we analyzed its convergence in the network system and validated its performance by experiments. The proposed VHFL could enhance the accuracy compared with the horizontal FL while protecting the security of global data.
Federated Learning (FL) is a collaborative machine learning technique to train a global model without obtaining clients' private data. The main challenges in FL are statistical diversity among clients, limited computing capability among clients' equipments, and the excessive communication overhead between servers and clients. To address these challenges, we propose a novel sparse personalized federated learning scheme via maximizing correlation FedMac. By incorporating an approximated L1-norm and the correlation between client models and global model into standard FL loss function, the performance on statistical diversity data is improved and the communicational and computational loads required in the network are reduced compared with non-sparse FL. Convergence analysis shows that the sparse constraints in FedMac do not affect the convergence rate of the global model, and theoretical results show that FedMac can achieve good sparse personalization, which is better than the personalized methods based on L2-norm. Experimentally, we demonstrate the benefits of this sparse personalization architecture compared with the state-of-the-art personalization methods (e.g. FedMac respectively achieves 98.95%, 99.37%, 90.90% and 89.06% accuracy on the MNIST, FMNIST, CIFAR-100 and Synthetic datasets under non-i.i.d. variants).
The distributed convex optimization problem over the multi-agent system is considered in this paper, and it is assumed that each agent possesses its own cost function and communicates with its neighbours over a sequence of time-varying directed graphs. However, due to some reasons there exist communication delays while agents receive information from other agents, and we are going to seek the optimal value of the sum of agents' loss functions in this case. We desire to handle this problem with the push-sum distributed dual averaging (PS-DDA) algorithm which is introduced in \cite{Tsianos2012}. It is proved that this algorithm converges and the error decays at a rate $\mathcal{O}\left(T^{-0.5}\right)$ with proper step size, where $T$ is iteration span. The main result presented in this paper also illustrates the convergence of the proposed algorithm is related to the maximum value of the communication delay on one edge. We finally apply the theoretical results to numerical simulations to show the PS-DDA algorithm's performance.
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 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.
There has been a surge of interest in continual learning and federated learning, both of which are important in deep neural networks in real-world scenarios. Yet little research has been done regarding the scenario where each client learns on a sequence of tasks from a private local data stream. This problem of federated continual learning poses new challenges to continual learning, such as utilizing knowledge from other clients, while preventing interference from irrelevant knowledge. To resolve these issues, we propose a novel federated continual learning framework, Federated Weighted Inter-client Transfer (FedWeIT), which decomposes the network weights into global federated parameters and sparse task-specific parameters, and each client receives selective knowledge from other clients by taking a weighted combination of their task-specific parameters. FedWeIT minimizes interference between incompatible tasks, and also allows positive knowledge transfer across clients during learning. We validate our \emph{FedWeIT}~against existing federated learning and continual learning methods under varying degrees of task similarity across clients, and our model significantly outperforms them with a large reduction in the communication cost.
Train machine learning models on sensitive user data has raised increasing privacy concerns in many areas. Federated learning is a popular approach for privacy protection that collects the local gradient information instead of real data. One way to achieve a strict privacy guarantee is to apply local differential privacy into federated learning. However, previous works do not give a practical solution due to three issues. First, the noisy data is close to its original value with high probability, increasing the risk of information exposure. Second, a large variance is introduced to the estimated average, causing poor accuracy. Last, the privacy budget explodes due to the high dimensionality of weights in deep learning models. In this paper, we proposed a novel design of local differential privacy mechanism for federated learning to address the abovementioned issues. It is capable of making the data more distinct from its original value and introducing lower variance. Moreover, the proposed mechanism bypasses the curse of dimensionality by splitting and shuffling model updates. A series of empirical evaluations on three commonly used datasets, MNIST, Fashion-MNIST and CIFAR-10, demonstrate that our solution can not only achieve superior deep learning performance but also provide a strong privacy guarantee at the same time.
We present one-shot federated learning, where a central server learns a global model over a network of federated devices in a single round of communication. Our approach - drawing on ensemble learning and knowledge aggregation - achieves an average relative gain of 51.5% in AUC over local baselines and comes within 90.1% of the (unattainable) global ideal. We discuss these methods and identify several promising directions of future work.
We train a recurrent neural network language model using a distributed, on-device learning framework called federated learning for the purpose of next-word prediction in a virtual keyboard for smartphones. Server-based training using stochastic gradient descent is compared with training on client devices using the Federated Averaging algorithm. The federated algorithm, which enables training on a higher-quality dataset for this use case, is shown to achieve better prediction recall. This work demonstrates the feasibility and benefit of training language models on client devices without exporting sensitive user data to servers. The federated learning environment gives users greater control over their data and simplifies the task of incorporating privacy by default with distributed training and aggregation across a population of client devices.