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.
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Federated Learning (FL) is a novel distributed machine learning which allows thousands of edge devices to train model locally without uploading data concentrically to the server. But since real federated settings are resource-constrained, FL is encountered with systems heterogeneity which causes a lot of stragglers directly and then leads to significantly accuracy reduction indirectly. To solve the problems caused by systems heterogeneity, we introduce a novel self-adaptive federated framework FedSAE which adjusts the training task of devices automatically and selects participants actively to alleviate the performance degradation. In this work, we 1) propose FedSAE which leverages the complete information of devices' historical training tasks to predict the affordable training workloads for each device. In this way, FedSAE can estimate the reliability of each device and self-adaptively adjust the amount of training load per client in each round. 2) combine our framework with Active Learning to self-adaptively select participants. Then the framework accelerates the convergence of the global model. In our framework, the server evaluates devices' value of training based on their training loss. Then the server selects those clients with bigger value for the global model to reduce communication overhead. The experimental result indicates that in a highly heterogeneous system, FedSAE converges faster than FedAvg, the vanilla FL framework. Furthermore, FedSAE outperforms than FedAvg on several federated datasets - FedSAE improves test accuracy by 26.7% and reduces stragglers by 90.3% on average.
Graph Neural Network (GNN) research is rapidly growing thanks to the capacity of GNNs to learn representations from graph-structured data. However, centralizing a massive amount of real-world graph data for GNN training is prohibitive due to user-side privacy concerns, regulation restrictions, and commercial competition. Federated learning (FL), a trending distributed learning paradigm, aims to solve this challenge while preserving privacy. Despite recent advances in vision and language domains, there is no suitable platform for the federated training of GNNs. To this end, we introduce FedGraphNN, an open research federated learning system and a benchmark to facilitate GNN-based FL research. FedGraphNN is built on a unified formulation of federated GNNs and supports commonly used datasets, GNN models, FL algorithms, and flexible APIs. We also contribute a new molecular dataset, hERG, to promote research exploration. Our experimental results present significant challenges in federated GNN training: federated GNNs perform worse in most datasets with a non-I.I.D split than centralized GNNs; the GNN model that attains the best result in the centralized setting may not hold its advantage in the federated setting. These results imply that more research efforts are needed to unravel the mystery behind federated GNN training. Moreover, our system performance analysis demonstrates that the FedGraphNN system is computationally affordable to most research labs with limited GPUs. We maintain the source code at //github.com/FedML-AI/FedGraphNN.
Data sharing remains a major hindering factor when it comes to adopting emerging AI technologies in general, but particularly in the agri-food sector. Protectiveness of data is natural in this setting; data is a precious commodity for data owners, which if used properly can provide them with useful insights on operations and processes leading to a competitive advantage. Unfortunately, novel AI technologies often require large amounts of training data in order to perform well, something that in many scenarios is unrealistic. However, recent machine learning advances, e.g. federated learning and privacy-preserving technologies, can offer a solution to this issue via providing the infrastructure and underpinning technologies needed to use data from various sources to train models without ever sharing the raw data themselves. In this paper, we propose a technical solution based on federated learning that uses decentralized data, (i.e. data that are not exchanged or shared but remain with the owners) to develop a cross-silo machine learning model that facilitates data sharing across supply chains. We focus our data sharing proposition on improving production optimization through soybean yield prediction, and provide potential use-cases that such methods can assist in other problem settings. Our results demonstrate that our approach not only performs better than each of the models trained on an individual data source, but also that data sharing in the agri-food sector can be enabled via alternatives to data exchange, whilst also helping to adopt emerging machine learning technologies to boost productivity.
Federated learning (FL) is a paradigm that allows distributed clients to learn a shared machine learning model without sharing their sensitive training data. While largely decentralized, FL requires resources to fund a central orchestrator or to reimburse contributors of datasets to incentivize participation. Inspired by insights from prior-independent auction design, we propose a mechanism, FIPIA (Federated Incentive Payments via Prior-Independent Auctions), to collect monetary contributions from self-interested clients. The mechanism operates in the semi-honest trust model and works even if clients have a heterogeneous interest in receiving high-quality models, and the server does not know the clients' level of interest. We run experiments on the MNIST, FashionMNIST, and CIFAR-10 datasets to test clients' model quality under FIPIA and FIPIA's incentive properties.
Due to the resource consumption for transmitting massive data and the concern for exposing sensitive data, it is impossible or undesirable to upload clients' local databases to a central server. Thus, federated learning has become a hot research area in enabling the collaborative training of machine learning models among multiple clients that hold sensitive local data. Nevertheless, unconstrained federated optimization has been studied mainly using stochastic gradient descent (SGD), which may converge slowly, and constrained federated optimization, which is more challenging, has not been investigated so far. This paper investigates sample-based and feature-based federated optimization, respectively, and considers both the unconstrained problem and the constrained problem for each of them. We propose federated learning algorithms using stochastic successive convex approximation (SSCA) and mini-batch techniques. We show that the proposed algorithms can preserve data privacy through the model aggregation mechanism, and their security can be enhanced via additional privacy mechanisms. We also show that the proposed algorithms converge to Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) points of the respective federated optimization problems. Besides, we customize the proposed algorithms to application examples and show that all updates have closed-form expressions. Finally, numerical experiments demonstrate the inherent advantages of the proposed algorithms in convergence speeds, communication costs, and model specifications.
Federated learning allows mobile clients to jointly train a global model without sending their private data to a central server. Extensive works have studied the performance guarantee of the global model, however, it is still unclear how each individual client influences the collaborative training process. In this work, we defined a new notion, called {\em Fed-Influence}, to quantify this influence over the model parameters, and proposed an effective and efficient algorithm to estimate this metric. In particular, our design satisfies several desirable properties: (1) it requires neither retraining nor retracing, adding only linear computational overhead to clients and the server; (2) it strictly maintains the tenets of federated learning, without revealing any client's local private data; and (3) it works well on both convex and non-convex loss functions, and does not require the final model to be optimal. Empirical results on a synthetic dataset and the FEMNIST dataset demonstrate that our estimation method can approximate Fed-Influence with small bias. Further, we show an application of Fed-Influence in model debugging.
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.
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.
Federated learning (FL) is a machine learning setting where many clients (e.g. mobile devices or whole organizations) collaboratively train a model under the orchestration of a central server (e.g. service provider), while keeping the training data decentralized. FL embodies the principles of focused data collection and minimization, and can mitigate many of the systemic privacy risks and costs resulting from traditional, centralized machine learning and data science approaches. Motivated by the explosive growth in FL research, this paper discusses recent advances and presents an extensive collection of open problems and challenges.
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.
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