We consider the problem of information aggregation in federated decision making, where a group of agents collaborate to infer the underlying state of nature without sharing their private data with the central processor or each other. We analyze the non-Bayesian social learning strategy in which agents incorporate their individual observations into their opinions (i.e., soft-decisions) with Bayes rule, and the central processor aggregates these opinions by arithmetic or geometric averaging. Building on our previous work, we establish that both pooling strategies result in asymptotic normality characterization of the system, which, for instance, can be utilized in order to give approximate expressions for the error probability. We verify the theoretical findings with simulations and compare both strategies.
Federated learning has shown enormous promise as a way of training ML models in distributed environments while reducing communication costs and protecting data privacy. However, the rise of complex cyber-physical systems, such as the Internet-of-Things, presents new challenges that are not met with traditional FL methods. Hierarchical Federated Learning extends the traditional FL process to enable more efficient model aggregation based on application needs or characteristics of the deployment environment (e.g., resource capabilities and/or network connectivity). It illustrates the benefits of balancing processing across the cloud-edge continuum. Hierarchical Federated Learning is likely to be a key enabler for a wide range of applications, such as smart farming and smart energy management, as it can improve performance and reduce costs, whilst also enabling FL workflows to be deployed in environments that are not well-suited to traditional FL. Model aggregation algorithms, software frameworks, and infrastructures will need to be designed and implemented to make such solutions accessible to researchers and engineers across a growing set of domains. H-FL also introduces a number of new challenges. For instance, there are implicit infrastructural challenges. There is also a trade-off between having generalised models and personalised models. If there exist geographical patterns for data (e.g., soil conditions in a smart farm likely are related to the geography of the region itself), then it is crucial that models used locally can consider their own locality in addition to a globally-learned model. H-FL will be crucial to future FL solutions as it can aggregate and distribute models at multiple levels to optimally serve the trade-off between locality dependence and global anomaly robustness.
Next-generation Wi-Fi networks are looking forward to introducing new features like multi-link operation (MLO) to both achieve higher throughput and lower latency. However, given the limited number of available channels, the use of multiple links by a group of contending Basic Service Sets (BSSs) can result in higher interference and channel contention, thus potentially leading to lower performance and reliability. In such a situation, it could be better for all contending BSSs to use less links if that contributes to reduce channel access contention. Recently, reinforcement learning (RL) has proven its potential for optimizing resource allocation in wireless networks. However, the independent operation of each wireless network makes difficult -- if not almost impossible -- for each individual network to learn a good configuration. To solve this issue, in this paper, we propose the use of a Federated Reinforcement Learning (FRL) framework, i.e., a collaborative machine learning approach to train models across multiple distributed agents without exchanging data, to collaboratively learn the the best MLO-Link Allocation (LA) strategy by a group of neighboring BSSs. The simulation results show that the FRL-based decentralized MLO-LA strategy achieves a better throughput fairness, and so a higher reliability -- because it allows the different BSSs to find a link allocation strategy which maximizes the minimum achieved data rate -- compared to fixed, random and RL-based MLO-LA schemes.
Machine and deep learning methods for medical and healthcare applications have shown significant progress and performance improvement in recent years. These methods require vast amounts of training data which are available in the medical sector, albeit decentralized. Medical institutions generate vast amounts of data for which sharing and centralizing remains a challenge as the result of data and privacy regulations. The federated learning technique is well-suited to tackle these challenges. However, federated learning comes with a new set of open problems related to communication overhead, efficient parameter aggregation, client selection strategies and more. In this work, we address the step prior to the initiation of a federated network for model training, client recruitment. By intelligently recruiting clients, communication overhead and overall cost of training can be reduced without sacrificing predictive performance. Client recruitment aims at pre-excluding potential clients from partaking in the federation based on a set of criteria indicative of their eventual contributions to the federation. In this work, we propose a client recruitment approach using only the output distribution and sample size at the client site. We show how a subset of clients can be recruited without sacrificing model performance whilst, at the same time, significantly improving computation time. By applying the recruitment approach to the training of federated models for accurate patient Length of Stay prediction using data from 189 Intensive Care Units, we show how the models trained in federations made up from recruited clients significantly outperform federated models trained with the standard procedure in terms of predictive power and training time.
Federated machine learning is growing fast in academia and industries as a solution to solve data hungriness and privacy issues in machine learning. Being a widely distributed system, federated machine learning requires various system design thinking. To better design a federated machine learning system, researchers have introduced multiple patterns and tactics that cover various system design aspects. However, the multitude of patterns leaves the designers confused about when and which pattern to adopt. In this paper, we present a set of decision models for the selection of patterns for federated machine learning architecture design based on a systematic literature review on federated machine learning, to assist designers and architects who have limited knowledge of federated machine learning. Each decision model maps functional and non-functional requirements of federated machine learning systems to a set of patterns. We also clarify the drawbacks of the patterns. We evaluated the decision models by mapping the decision patterns to concrete federated machine learning architectures by big tech firms to assess the models' correctness and usefulness. The evaluation results indicate that the proposed decision models are able to bring structure to the federated machine learning architecture design process and help explicitly articulate the design rationale.
A proper fusion of complex data is of interest to many researchers in diverse fields, including computational statistics, computational geometry, bioinformatics, machine learning, pattern recognition, quality management, engineering, statistics, finance, economics, etc. It plays a crucial role in: synthetic description of data processes or whole domains, creation of rule bases for approximate reasoning tasks, reaching consensus and selection of the optimal strategy in decision support systems, imputation of missing values, data deduplication and consolidation, record linkage across heterogeneous databases, and clustering. This open-access research monograph integrates the spread-out results from different domains using the methodology of the well-established classical aggregation framework, introduces researchers and practitioners to Aggregation 2.0, as well as points out the challenges and interesting directions for further research.
Since the cyberspace consolidated as fifth warfare dimension, the different actors of the defense sector began an arms race toward achieving cyber superiority, on which research, academic and industrial stakeholders contribute from a dual vision, mostly linked to a large and heterogeneous heritage of developments and adoption of civilian cybersecurity capabilities. In this context, augmenting the conscious of the context and warfare environment, risks and impacts of cyber threats on kinetic actuations became a critical rule-changer that military decision-makers are considering. A major challenge on acquiring mission-centric Cyber Situational Awareness (CSA) is the dynamic inference and assessment of the vertical propagations from situations that occurred at the mission supportive Information and Communications Technologies (ICT), up to their relevance at military tactical, operational and strategical views. In order to contribute on acquiring CSA, this paper addresses a major gap in the cyber defence state-of-the-art: the dynamic identification of Key Cyber Terrains (KCT) on a mission-centric context. Accordingly, the proposed KCT identification approach explores the dependency degrees among tasks and assets defined by commanders as part of the assessment criteria. These are correlated with the discoveries on the operational network and the asset vulnerabilities identified thorough the supported mission development. The proposal is presented as a reference model that reveals key aspects for mission-centric KCT analysis and supports its enforcement and further enforcement by including an illustrative application case.
Analyzing observational data from multiple sources can be useful for increasing statistical power to detect a treatment effect; however, practical constraints such as privacy considerations may restrict individual-level information sharing across data sets. This paper develops federated methods that only utilize summary-level information from heterogeneous data sets. Our federated methods provide doubly-robust point estimates of treatment effects as well as variance estimates. We derive the asymptotic distributions of our federated estimators, which are shown to be asymptotically equivalent to the corresponding estimators from the combined, individual-level data. We show that to achieve these properties, federated methods should be adjusted based on conditions such as whether models are correctly specified and stable across heterogeneous data sets.
In this paper, we propose a novel Feature Decomposition and Reconstruction Learning (FDRL) method for effective facial expression recognition. We view the expression information as the combination of the shared information (expression similarities) across different expressions and the unique information (expression-specific variations) for each expression. More specifically, FDRL mainly consists of two crucial networks: a Feature Decomposition Network (FDN) and a Feature Reconstruction Network (FRN). In particular, FDN first decomposes the basic features extracted from a backbone network into a set of facial action-aware latent features to model expression similarities. Then, FRN captures the intra-feature and inter-feature relationships for latent features to characterize expression-specific variations, and reconstructs the expression feature. To this end, two modules including an intra-feature relation modeling module and an inter-feature relation modeling module are developed in FRN. Experimental results on both the in-the-lab databases (including CK+, MMI, and Oulu-CASIA) and the in-the-wild databases (including RAF-DB and SFEW) show that the proposed FDRL method consistently achieves higher recognition accuracy than several state-of-the-art methods. This clearly highlights the benefit of feature decomposition and reconstruction for classifying expressions.
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.
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.