Federated learning is a distributed machine learning approach to privacy preservation and two major technical challenges prevent a wider application of federated learning. One is that federated learning raises high demands on communication, since a large number of model parameters must be transmitted between the server and the clients. The other challenge is that training large machine learning models such as deep neural networks in federated learning requires a large amount of computational resources, which may be unrealistic for edge devices such as mobile phones. The problem becomes worse when deep neural architecture search is to be carried out in federated learning. To address the above challenges, we propose an evolutionary approach to real-time federated neural architecture search that not only optimize the model performance but also reduces the local payload. During the search, a double-sampling technique is introduced, in which for each individual, a randomly sampled sub-model of a master model is transmitted to a number of randomly sampled clients for training without reinitialization. This way, we effectively reduce computational and communication costs required for evolutionary optimization and avoid big performance fluctuations of the local models, making the proposed framework well suited for real-time federated neural architecture search.
State Key Laboratory of Networking and Switching Technology (BUPT)（网络与交换技术国家重点实验室（北京邮电大学））；Key Lab of High Confidence Software Technologies (Peking University)（高可信软件技术重点实验室（北京大学））
To preserve user privacy while enabling mobile intelligence, techniques have been proposed to train deep neural networks on decentralized data. However, training over decentralized data makes the design of neural architecture quite difficult as it already was. Such difficulty is further amplified when designing and deploying different neural architectures for heterogeneous mobile platforms. In this work, we propose an automatic neural architecture search into the decentralized training, as a new DNN training paradigm called Federated Neural Architecture Search, namely federated NAS. To deal wi…
Federated Learning (FL) has been proved to be an effective learning framework when data cannot be centralized due to privacy, communication costs, and regulatory restrictions. When training deep learning models under an FL setting, people employ the predefined model architecture discovered in the centralized environment. However, this predefined architecture may not be the optimal choice because it may not fit data with non-identical and independent distribution (non-IID). Thus, we advocate automating federated learning (AutoFL) to improve model accuracy and reduce the manual design effort. We…
University of California San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）；Rutgers University（罗格斯大学）
Neural architecture search, which aims to automatically search for architectures (e.g., convolution, max pooling) of neural networks that maximize validation performance, has achieved remarkable progress recently. In many application scenarios, several parties would like to collaboratively search for a shared neural architecture by leveraging data from all parties. However, due to privacy concerns, no party wants its data to be seen by other parties. To address this problem, we propose federated neural architecture search (FNAS), where different parties collectively search for a differentiable…
Brandeis University（布兰迪斯大学）；Northeastern University（东北大学）；Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data（深圳大数据研究院）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；University of Windsor（温莎大学）
Neural networks often encounter various stringent resource constraints while deploying on edge devices. To tackle these problems with less human efforts, automated machine learning becomes popular in finding various neural architectures that fit diverse Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) scenarios. Recently, to prevent the leakage of private information while enable automated machine intelligence, there is an emerging trend to integrate federated learning and neural architecture search (NAS). Although promising as it may seem, the coupling of difficulties from both tenets makes the algor…
Neural Architecture Search (NAS) is a collection of methods to craft the way neural networks are built. We apply this idea to Federated Learning (FL), wherein predefined neural network models are trained on the client/device data. This approach is not optimal as the model developers can't observe the local data, and hence, are unable to build highly accurate and efficient models. NAS is promising for FL which can search for global and personalized models automatically for the non-IID data. Most NAS methods are computationally expensive and require fine-tuning after the search, making it a two-…
Federated learning (FL) has recently gained considerable attention due to its ability to learn on decentralised data while preserving client privacy. However, it also poses additional challenges related to the heterogeneity of the participating devices, both in terms of their computational capabilities and contributed data. Meanwhile, Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has been successfully used with centralised datasets, producing state-of-the-art results in constrained or unconstrained settings. However, such centralised datasets may not be always available for training. Most recent work at th…
University of Southern California（南加州大学）；University of Minnesota（明尼苏达大学）
Federated learning (FL) is an efficient learning framework that assists distributed machine learning when data cannot be shared with a centralized server due to privacy and regulatory restrictions. Recent advancements in FL use predefined architecture-based learning for all the clients. However, given that clients' data are invisible to the server and data distributions are non-identical across clients, a predefined architecture discovered in a centralized setting may not be an optimal solution for all the clients in FL. Motivated by this challenge, in this work, we introduce SPIDER, an algori…
TU Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）；Hessian Center for AI (hessianAI)（黑森人工智能中心（hessianAI））；Centre for Cognitive Science, TU Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学认知科学中心）
Deep neural architectures have profound impact on achieved performance in many of today's AI tasks, yet, their design still heavily relies on human prior knowledge and experience. Neural architecture search (NAS) together with hyperparameter optimization (HO) helps to reduce this dependence. However, state of the art NAS and HO rapidly become infeasible with increasing amount of data being stored in a distributed fashion, typically violating data privacy regulations such as GDPR and CCPA. As a remedy, we introduce FEATHERS - $\textbf{FE}$derated $\textbf{A}$rchi$\textbf{T}$ecture and $\textbf{…
Federated learning is an emerging technique used to prevent the leakage of private information. Unlike centralized learning that needs to collect data from users and store them collectively on a cloud server, federated learning makes it possible to learn a global model while the data are distributed on the users' devices. However, compared with the traditional centralized approach, the federated setting consumes considerable communication resources of the clients, which is indispensable for updating global models and prevents this technique from being widely used. In this paper, we aim to opti…
Google（谷歌）；Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；Oxford University（牛津大学）；Waymo（Waymo公司）；UC Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）
In this paper, we approach the problem of optimizing blackbox functions over large hybrid search spaces consisting of both combinatorial and continuous parameters. We demonstrate that previous evolutionary algorithms which rely on mutation-based approaches, while flexible over combinatorial spaces, suffer from a curse of dimensionality in high dimensional continuous spaces both theoretically and empirically, which thus limits their scope over hybrid search spaces as well. In order to combat this curse, we propose ES-ENAS, a simple and modular joint optimization procedure combining the class of…
Northeastern University（东北大学）；Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data（深圳大数据研究院）
To prevent the leakage of private information while enabling automated machine intelligence, there is an emerging trend to integrate federated learning and Neural Architecture Search (NAS). Although promising as it may seem, the coupling of difficulties from both two tenets makes the algorithm development quite challenging. In particular, how to efficiently search the optimal neural architecture directly from massive non-iid data of clients in a federated manner remains to be a hard nut to crack. To tackle this challenge, in this paper, by leveraging the advances in proxy-less NAS, we propose …
Seoul National University（首尔国立大学）；SK Telecom Co., Ltd.（SK电讯株式会社）
The early pioneering Neural Architecture Search (NAS) works were multi-trial methods applicable to any general search space. The subsequent works took advantage of the early findings and developed weight-sharing methods that assume a structured search space typically with pre-fixed hyperparameters. Despite the amazing computational efficiency of the weight-sharing NAS algorithms, it is becoming apparent that multi-trial NAS algorithms are also needed for identifying very high-performance architectures, especially when exploring a general search space. In this work, we carefully review the late…
Evolutionary Architecture Search through Grammar-Based Sequence Alignment
Carlos III University of Madrid（马德里卡洛斯三世大学）；University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；Instituto de Investigación Sanitaria Gregorio Marañón（Gregorio Marañón卫生研究院）；Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin für Materialien und Energie（柏林材料与能源研究中心）；ELLIS Institute Tübingen（图宾根ELLIS研究所）；University of Glasgow（格拉斯哥大学）
Neural Architecture Search (NAS) algorithms are intended to remove the burden of manual neural network design, and have shown to be capable of designing excellent models for a variety of well-known problems. However, these algorithms require a variety of design parameters in the form of user configuration or hard-coded decisions which limit the variety of networks that can be discovered. This means that NAS algorithms do not eliminate model design tuning, they instead merely shift the burden of where that tuning needs to be applied. In this paper, we present SpiderNet, a hybrid differentiable-…
National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所模式识别国家重点实验室）；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）；Horizon Robotics（地平线机器人）；Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）
Neural Architecture Search (NAS) is an important yet challenging task in network design due to its high computational consumption. To address this issue, we propose the Reinforced Evolutionary Neural Architecture Search (RE- NAS), which is an evolutionary method with the reinforced mutation for NAS. Our method integrates reinforced mutation into an evolution algorithm for neural architecture exploration, in which a mutation controller is introduced to learn the effects of slight modifications and make mutation actions. The reinforced mutation controller guides the model population to evolve ef…
East China University of Science and Technology（华东理工大学）；University of Surrey（萨里大学）
Data-driven evolutionary optimization has witnessed great success in solving complex real-world optimization problems. However, existing data-driven optimization algorithms require that all data are centrally stored, which is not always practical and may be vulnerable to privacy leakage and security threats if the data must be collected from different devices. To address the above issue, this paper proposes a federated data-driven evolutionary optimization framework that is able to perform data driven optimization when the data is distributed on multiple devices. On the basis of federated lear…
Distributed fuzzy neural networks (DFNNs) have attracted increasing attention recently due to their learning abilities in handling data uncertainties in distributed scenarios. However, it is challenging for DFNNs to handle cases in which the local data are non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID). In this paper, we propose a federated fuzzy neural network (FedFNN) with evolutionary rule learning (ERL) to cope with non-IID issues as well as data uncertainties. The FedFNN maintains a global set of rules in a server and a personalized subset of these rules for each local client. ERL …
FedCross: Intertemporal Federated Learning Under Evolutionary Games
Wuhan University of Science and Technology（武汉科技大学）；Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学）；Ministry of Education（教育部）；Zhejiang Normal University（浙江师范大学）
Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）
Recently, some Neural Architecture Search (NAS) techniques are proposed for the automatic design of Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) architectures. They bring great convenience to the use of GCN, but could hardly apply to the Federated Learning (FL) scenarios with distributed and private datasets, which limit their applications. Moreover, they need to train many candidate GCN models from scratch, which is inefficient for FL. To address these challenges, we propose FL-AGCNS, an efficient GCN NAS algorithm suitable for FL scenarios. FL-AGCNS designs a federated evolutionary optimization strateg…
Online federated learning (OFL) and online transfer learning (OTL) are two collaborative paradigms for overcoming modern machine learning challenges such as data silos, streaming data, and data security. This survey explored OFL and OTL throughout their major evolutionary routes to enhance understanding of online federated and transfer learning. Besides, practical aspects of popular datasets and cutting-edge applications for online federated and transfer learning are highlighted in this work. Furthermore, this survey provides insight into potential future research areas and aims to serve as a …
Tool-Aided Evolutionary LLM for Generative Policy Toward Efficient Resource Management in Wireless Federated Learning
College of Information Science and Electronic Engineering, Zhejiang University（浙江大学信息科学与电子工程学院）；Zhejiang Lab（浙江实验室）；University of Manitoba（曼尼托巴大学）；Macau University of Science and Technology（澳门科学理工学院）
LinkedIn has grown to become a platform hosting diverse sources of information ranging from member profiles, jobs, professional groups, slideshows etc. Given the existence of multiple sources, when a member issues a query like "software engineer", the member could look for software engineer profiles, jobs or professional groups. To tackle this problem, we exploit a data-driven approach that extracts searcher intents from their profile data and recent activities at a large scale. The intents such as job seeking, hiring, content consuming are used to construct features to personalize federated s…
Neural Architecture Search has shown potential to automate the design of neural networks. Deep Reinforcement Learning based agents can learn complex architectural patterns, as well as explore a vast and compositional search space. On the other hand, evolutionary algorithms offer higher sample efficiency, which is critical for such a resource intensive application. In order to capture the best of both worlds, we propose a class of Evolutionary-Neural hybrid agents (Evo-NAS). We show that the Evo-NAS agent outperforms both neural and evolutionary agents when applied to architecture search for a …
Sorbonne Université（索邦大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Institut des Systèmes Intelligents et de Robotique（智能系统与机器人研究所）
Deep neuroevolution, that is evolutionary policy search methods based on deep neural networks, have recently emerged as a competitor to deep reinforcement learning algorithms due to their better parallelization capabilities. However, these methods still suffer from a far worse sample efficiency. In this paper we investigate whether a mechanism known as "importance mixing" can significantly improve their sample efficiency. We provide a didactic presentation of importance mixing and we explain how it can be extended to reuse more samples. Then, from an empirical comparison based on a simple benc…
Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology（莫斯科物理技术学院）；King Abdullah University of Science and Technology（阿卜杜拉国王科技大学）
In order to mitigate the high communication cost in distributed and federated learning, various vector compression schemes, such as quantization, sparsification and dithering, have become very popular. In designing a compression method, one aims to communicate as few bits as possible, which minimizes the cost per communication round, while at the same time attempting to impart as little distortion (variance) to the communicated messages as possible, which minimizes the adverse effect of the compression on the overall number of communication rounds. However, intuitively, these two goals are fun…
Many applications in machine learning require optimizing a function whose true gradient is unknown, but where surrogate gradient information (directions that may be correlated with, but not necessarily identical to, the true gradient) is available instead. This arises when an approximate gradient is easier to compute than the full gradient (e.g. in meta-learning or unrolled optimization), or when a true gradient is intractable and is replaced with a surrogate (e.g. in certain reinforcement learning applications, or when using synthetic gradients). We propose Guided Evolutionary Strategies, a m…
School of Cyber Engineering, Xidian University（西安电子科技大学电子工程学院）；Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院）；Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）；Cyberspace Institute of Advanced Technology, Guangzhou University（广州大学空天信息研究院）
For deep neural network accelerators, memory movement is both energetically expensive and can bound computation. Therefore, optimal mapping of tensors to memory hierarchies is critical to performance. The growing complexity of neural networks calls for automated memory mapping instead of manual heuristic approaches; yet the search space of neural network computational graphs have previously been prohibitively large. We introduce Evolutionary Graph Reinforcement Learning (EGRL), a method designed for large search spaces, that combines graph neural networks, reinforcement learning, and evolution…
Universidad de la República（共和国大学）；ITIS Software, Universidad de Málaga（马拉加大学ITIS软件研究所）
This article presents an evolutionary approach for synthetic human portraits generation based on the latent space exploration of a generative adversarial network. The idea is to produce different human face images very similar to a given target portrait. The approach applies StyleGAN2 for portrait generation and FaceNet for face similarity evaluation. The evolutionary search is based on exploring the real-coded latent space of StyleGAN2. The main results over both synthetic and real images indicate that the proposed approach generates accurate and diverse solutions, which represent realistic h…
University of California San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）；Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data（深圳大数据研究院）
The diversity of intrinsic qualities of multimedia entities tends to impede their effective retrieval. In a SelfLearning Search Engine architecture, the subtle nuances of human perceptions and deep knowledge are taught and captured through unsupervised reinforcement learning, where the degree of reinforcement may be suitably calibrated. Such architectural paradigm enables indexes to evolve naturally while accommodating the dynamic changes of user interests. It operates by continuously constructing indexes over time, while injecting progressive improvement in search performance. For search oper…
Machine learning models work better when curated features are provided to them. Feature engineering methods have been usually used as a preprocessing step to obtain or build a proper feature set. In late years, autoencoders (a specific type of symmetrical neural network) have been widely used to perform representation learning, proving their competitiveness against classical feature engineering algorithms. The main obstacle in the use of autoencoders is finding a good architecture, a process that most experts confront manually. An automated autoencoder architecture search procedure, based on e…
HEAS: Hierarchical Evolutionary Agent-Based Simulation Framework for Multi-Objective Policy Search
Department of Politics and Public Administration（政治与公共行政系）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Department of Applied Social Sciences（应用社会科学系）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）
The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；Cognizant Technology Solutions（高知特科技解决方案公司）
The main power of artificial intelligence is not in modeling what we already know, but in creating solutions that are new. Such solutions exist in extremely large, high-dimensional, and complex search spaces. Population-based search techniques, i.e. variants of evolutionary computation, are well suited to finding them. These techniques make it possible to find creative solutions to practical problems in the real world, making creative AI through evolutionary computation the likely "next deep learning."
