In federated learning (FL), reducing the communication overhead is one of the most critical challenges since the parameter server and the mobile devices share the training parameters over wireless links. With such consideration, we adopt the idea of SignSGD in which only the signs of the gradients are exchanged. Moreover, most of the existing works assume Channel State Information (CSI) available at both the mobile devices and the parameter server, and thus the mobile devices can adopt fixed transmission rates dictated by the channel capacity. In this work, only the parameter server side CSI is assumed, and channel capacity with outage is considered. In this case, an essential problem for the mobile devices is to select appropriate local processing and communication parameters (including the transmission rates) to achieve a desired balance between the overall learning performance and their energy consumption. Two optimization problems are formulated and solved, which optimize the learning performance given the energy consumption requirement, and vice versa. Furthermore, considering that the data may be distributed across the mobile devices in a highly uneven fashion in FL, a stochastic sign-based algorithm is proposed. Extensive simulations are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.
There is a growing interest in the wireless communications community to complement the traditional model-based design approaches with data-driven machine learning (ML)-based solutions. While conventional ML approaches rely on the assumption of having the data and processing heads in a central entity, this is not always feasible in wireless communications applications because of the inaccessibility of private data and large communication overhead required to transmit raw data to central ML processors. As a result, decentralized ML approaches that keep the data where it is generated are much mor…
University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；University of New South Wales（新南威尔士大学）；Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）
Wireless federated learning (FL) is an emerging machine learning paradigm that trains a global parametric model from distributed datasets via wireless communications. This paper proposes a unit-modulus wireless FL (UMWFL) framework, which simultaneously uploads local model parameters and computes global model parameters via optimized phase shifting. The proposed framework avoids sophisticated baseband signal processing, leading to both low communication delays and implementation costs. A training loss bound is derived and a penalty alternating minimization (PAM) algorithm is proposed to minimi…
In this paper, we consider the problem of wireless federated learning based on sign stochastic gradient descent (signSGD) algorithm via a multiple access channel. When sending locally computed gradient's sign information, each mobile device requires to apply precoding to circumvent wireless fading effects. In practice, however, acquiring perfect knowledge of channel state information (CSI) at all mobile devices is infeasible. In this paper, we present a simple yet effective precoding method with limited channel knowledge, called sign-alignment precoding. The idea of sign-alignment precoding is…
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology（韩国科学技术院）；King’s College London（伦敦国王学院）
Cooperative training methods for distributed machine learning typically assume noiseless and ideal communication channels. This work studies some of the opportunities and challenges arising from the presence of wireless communication links. We specifically consider wireless implementations of Federated Learning (FL) and Federated Distillation (FD), as well as of a novel Hybrid Federated Distillation (HFD) scheme. Both digital implementations based on separate source-channel coding and over-the-air computing implementations based on joint source-channel coding are proposed and evaluated over Ga…
Thompson Rivers University（汤普森河大学）；University of Luxembourg（卢森堡大学）
In order to meet the extremely heterogeneous requirements of the next generation wireless communication networks, research community is increasingly dependent on using machine learning solutions for real-time decision-making and radio resource management. Traditional machine learning employs fully centralized architecture in which the entire training data is collected at one node e.g., cloud server, that significantly increases the communication overheads and also raises severe privacy concerns. Towards this end, a distributed machine learning paradigm termed as Federated learning (FL) has bee…
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki（塞萨洛尼基亚里士多德大学）
Conventional machine learning techniques are conducted in a centralized manner. Recently, the massive volume of generated wireless data, the privacy concerns and the increasing computing capabilities of wireless end-devices have led to the emergence of a promising decentralized solution, termed as Wireless Federated Learning (WFL). In this first of the two parts paper, we present the application of WFL in the sixth generation of wireless networks (6G), which is envisioned to be an integrated communication and computing platform. After analyzing the key concepts of WFL, we discuss the core chal…
Federated Learning (FL) is very appealing for its privacy benefits: essentially, a global model is trained with updates computed on mobile devices while keeping the data of users local. Standard FL infrastructures are however designed to have no energy or performance impact on mobile devices, and are therefore not suitable for applications that require frequent (online) model updates, such as news recommenders. This paper presents FLeet, the first Online FL system, acting as a middleware between the Android OS and the machine learning application. FLeet combines the privacy of Standard FL with…
With growth in the number of smart devices and advancements in their hardware, in recent years, data-driven machine learning techniques have drawn significant attention. However, due to privacy and communication issues, it is not possible to collect this data at a centralized location. Federated learning is a machine learning setting where the centralized location trains a learning model over remote devices. Federated learning algorithms cannot be employed in the real world scenarios unless they consider unreliable and resource-constrained nature of the wireless medium. In this paper, we propo…
POSTECH（浦项科技大学）；Hanyang University（汉阳大学）；Weizmann Institute of Science（魏茨曼科学研究所）
Federated learning is a privacy-preserving and distributed training method using heterogeneous data sets stored at local devices. Federated learning over wireless networks requires aggregating locally computed gradients at a server where the mobile devices send statistically distinct gradient information over heterogenous communication links. This paper proposes a Bayesian federated learning (BFL) algorithm to aggregate the heterogeneous quantized gradient information optimally in the sense of minimizing the mean-squared error (MSE). The idea of BFL is to aggregate the one-bit quantized local …
University of Virginia（弗吉尼亚大学）；University of Miami（迈阿密大学）；Sun Yat-Sen University（中山大学）
We advocate a new resource allocation framework, which we term resource rationing, for wireless federated learning (FL). Unlike existing resource allocation methods for FL, resource rationing focuses on balancing resources across learning rounds so that their collective impact on the federated learning performance is explicitly captured. This new framework can be integrated seamlessly with existing resource allocation schemes to optimize the convergence of FL. In particular, a novel "later-is-better" principle is at the front and center of resource rationing, which is validated empirically in …
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki（塞萨洛尼基亚里士多德大学）
Recently, federated learning (FL) has sparked widespread attention as a promising decentralized machine learning approach which provides privacy and low delay. However, communication bottleneck still constitutes an issue, that needs to be resolved for an efficient deployment of FL over wireless networks. In this paper, we aim to minimize the total convergence time of FL, by quantizing the local model parameters prior to uplink transmission. More specifically, the convergence analysis of the FL algorithm with stochastic quantization is firstly presented, which reveals the impact of the quantiza…
In conventional federated learning (FL), differential privacy (DP) guarantees can be obtained by injecting additional noise to local model updates before transmitting to the parameter server (PS). In the wireless FL scenario, we show that the privacy of the system can be boosted by exploiting over-the-air computation (OAC) and anonymizing the transmitting devices. In OAC, devices transmit their model updates simultaneously and in an uncoded fashion, resulting in a much more efficient use of the available spectrum. We further exploit OAC to provide anonymity for the transmitting devices. The pr…
This paper studies federated learning (FL) in a classic wireless network, where learning clients share a common wireless link to a coordinating server to perform federated model training using their local data. In such wireless federated learning networks (WFLNs), optimizing the learning performance depends crucially on how clients are selected and how bandwidth is allocated among the selected clients in every learning round, as both radio and client energy resources are limited. While existing works have made some attempts to allocate the limited wireless resources to optimize FL, they focus …
Arizona State University（亚利桑那州立大学）；Harvard University（哈佛大学）
We consider a many-to-one wireless architecture for federated learning at the network edge, where multiple edge devices collaboratively train a model using local data. The unreliable nature of wireless connectivity, together with constraints in computing resources at edge devices, dictates that the local updates at edge devices should be carefully crafted and compressed to match the wireless communication resources available and should work in concert with the receiver. Thus motivated, we propose SGD-based bandlimited coordinate descent algorithms for such settings. Specifically, for the wirel…
We investigate a data quality-aware dynamic client selection problem for multiple federated learning (FL) services in a wireless network, where each client offers dynamic datasets for the simultaneous training of multiple FL services, and each FL service demander has to pay for the clients under constrained monetary budgets. The problem is formalized as a non-cooperative Markov game over the training rounds. A multi-agent hybrid deep reinforcement learning-based algorithm is proposed to optimize the joint client selection and payment actions, while avoiding action conflicts. Simulation results…
King’s College London（伦敦国王学院）；Princeton University（普林斯顿大学）；Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data（深圳大数据研究院）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Virginia Tech（弗吉尼亚理工大学）；Kyung Hee University（庆熙大学）
In this paper, the problem of delay minimization for federated learning (FL) over wireless communication networks is investigated. In the considered model, each user exploits limited local computational resources to train a local FL model with its collected data and, then, sends the trained FL model parameters to a base station (BS) which aggregates the local FL models and broadcasts the aggregated FL model back to all the users. Since FL involves learning model exchanges between the users and the BS, both computation and communication latencies are determined by the required learning accuracy…
Royal Institute of Technology (KTH)（皇家理工学院（KTH））；Princeton University（普林斯顿大学）
To leverage massive distributed data and computation resources, machine learning in the network edge is considered to be a promising technique especially for large-scale model training. Federated learning (FL), as a paradigm of collaborative learning techniques, has obtained increasing research attention with the benefits of communication efficiency and improved data privacy. Due to the lossy communication channels and limited communication resources (e.g., bandwidth and power), it is of interest to investigate fast responding and accurate FL schemes over wireless systems. Hence, we investigat…
Mississippi State University（密西西比州立大学）；National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University（阳明交通大学）；Texas Tech University（德克萨斯理工大学）
This paper presents a novel approach to conduct highly efficient federated learning (FL) over a massive wireless edge network, where an edge server and numerous mobile devices (clients) jointly learn a global model without transporting the huge amount of data collected by the mobile devices to the edge server. The proposed FL approach is referred to as spatio-temporal FL (STFL), which jointly exploits the spatial and temporal correlations between the learning updates from different mobile devices scheduled to join STFL in various training epochs. The STFL model not only represents the realisti…
A Novel Collaborative Framework for Efficient Synchronization in Split Federated Learning over Wireless Networks
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Concordia University（电气与计算机工程系，康科迪亚大学）；Department of Physics and Computer Science, Faculty of Science, Wilfrid Laurier University（物理与计算机科学系，科学学院，威尔弗里德·劳里埃大学）
Wireless connectivity is instrumental in enabling scalable federated learning (FL), yet wireless channels bring challenges for model training, in which channel randomness perturbs each worker's model update while multiple workers' updates incur significant interference under limited bandwidth. To address these challenges, in this work we formulate a novel constrained optimization problem, and propose an FL framework harnessing wireless channel perturbations and interference for improving privacy, bandwidth-efficiency, and scalability. The resultant algorithm is coined analog federated ADMM (A-…
Purdue University（普渡大学）；NC State University（北卡罗来纳州立大学）
Machine learning (ML) tasks are becoming ubiquitous in today's network applications. Federated learning has emerged recently as a technique for training ML models at the network edge by leveraging processing capabilities across the nodes that collect the data. There are several challenges with employing conventional federated learning in contemporary networks, due to the significant heterogeneity in compute and communication capabilities that exist across devices. To address this, we advocate a new learning paradigm called fog learning which will intelligently distribute ML model training acro…
Texas A&M University（德克萨斯农工大学）；Texas A&M University at Qatar（德克萨斯农工大学卡塔尔分校）；Qatar Foundation Research, Development and Innovation RDI（卡塔尔基金会研究、开发与创新（RDI））；Tennessee Tech University（田纳西理工大学）
This paper proposes using communication pipelining to enhance the wireless spectrum utilization efficiency and convergence speed of federated learning in mobile edge computing applications. Due to limited wireless sub-channels, a subset of the total clients is scheduled in each iteration of federated learning algorithms. On the other hand, the scheduled clients wait for the slowest client to finish its computation. We propose to first cluster the clients based on the time they need per iteration to compute the local gradients of the federated learning model. Then, we schedule a mixture of clie…
Federated learning (FL) offers a decentralized learning environment so that a group of clients can collaborate to train a global model at the server, while keeping their training data confidential. This paper studies how to launch over-the-air jamming attacks to disrupt the FL process when it is executed over a wireless network. As a wireless example, FL is applied to learn how to classify wireless signals collected by clients (spectrum sensors) at different locations (such as in cooperative sensing). An adversary can jam the transmissions for the local model updates from clients to the server…
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Princeton University（普林斯顿大学电气与计算机工程系）；Department of Engineering, King’s College London（伦敦国王学院工程系）；Beijing Key Laboratory of Network System Architecture and Convergence, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学网络系统架构与融合北京市重点实验室）；Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data and Future Network of Intelligence Institute, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳）智能科学与技术研究院未来网络与大数据研究院深圳分院）
In this paper, the problem of training federated learning (FL) algorithms over a realistic wireless network is studied. In particular, in the considered model, wireless users execute an FL algorithm while training their local FL models using their own data and transmitting the trained local FL models to a base station (BS) that will generate a global FL model and send it back to the users. Since all training parameters are transmitted over wireless links, the quality of the training will be affected by wireless factors such as packet errors and the availability of wireless resources. Meanwhile…
Federated learning (FL) has recently emerged as an attractive decentralized solution for wireless networks to collaboratively train a shared model while keeping data localized. As a general approach, existing FL methods tend to assume perfect knowledge of the Channel State Information (CSI) during the training phase, which may not be easy to acquire in case of fast fading channels. Moreover, literature analyses either consider a fixed number of clients participating in the training of the federated model, or simply assume that all clients operate at the maximum achievable rate to transmit mode…
When Differential Privacy Meets Wireless Federated Learning: An Improved Analysis for Privacy and Convergence
School of Informatics, Xiamen University, China（厦门大学信息学院，中国）；Internet of Things Thrust, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), China（香港科技大学（广州）物联网研究组，中国）
Efficient Wireless Federated Learning via Low-Rank Gradient Factorization
School of Information Science and Technology, ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学信息科学与技术学院）；School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow（格拉斯哥大学计算科学学院）
Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, University of Tokyo（东京大学信息科学技术研究生院）
Wireless ad hoc federated learning (WAFL) is a fully decentralized collaborative machine learning framework organized by opportunistically encountered mobile nodes. Compared to conventional federated learning, WAFL performs model training by weakly synchronizing the model parameters with others, and this shows great resilience to a poisoned model injected by an attacker. In this paper, we provide our theoretical analysis of the WAFL's resilience against model poisoning attacks, by formulating the force balance between the poisoned model and the legitimate model. According to our experiments, w…
Joint Optimization for Federated Learning and Transmission over Unreliable Wireless Networks with Heterogeneous Data
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；Jiaxing University（嘉兴学院）；Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）；Southeast University（东南大学）
Federated Latent Factor Learning for Recovering Wireless Sensor Networks Signal with Privacy-Preserving
College of Computer and Information Science（计算机与信息科学学院）；Southwest University（西南大学）；School of Engineering（工程学院）；University of Western Australia（西澳大学）；College of Food Science（食品科学学院）；Chongqing True Flavor Food Co LTD（重庆真味食品有限公司）
This paper studies a federated learning (FL) system, where \textit{multiple} FL services co-exist in a wireless network and share common wireless resources. It fills the void of wireless resource allocation for multiple simultaneous FL services in the existing literature. Our method designs a two-level resource allocation framework comprising \emph{intra-service} resource allocation and \emph{inter-service} resource allocation. The intra-service resource allocation problem aims to minimize the length of FL rounds by optimizing the bandwidth allocation among the clients of each FL service. Base…
Privacy-sensitive data is stored in autonomous vehicles, smart devices, or sensor nodes that can move around with making opportunistic contact with each other. Federation among such nodes was mainly discussed in the context of federated learning with a centralized mechanism in many works. However, because of multi-vendor issues, those nodes do not want to rely on a specific server operated by a third party for this purpose. In this paper, we propose a wireless ad hoc federated learning (WAFL) -- a fully distributed cooperative machine learning organized by the nodes physically nearby. WAFL can…
Hitachi (China) Research & Development Cooperation（日立（中国）研发有限公司）
In federated learning (FL), devices contribute to the global training by uploading their local model updates via wireless channels. Due to limited computation and communication resources, device scheduling is crucial to the convergence rate of FL. In this paper, we propose a joint device scheduling and resource allocation policy to maximize the model accuracy within a given total training time budget for latency constrained wireless FL. A lower bound on the reciprocal of the training performance loss, in terms of the number of training rounds and the number of scheduled devices per round, is d…
University of North Carolina at Charlotte（北卡罗来纳大学夏洛特分校）；Intel Labs（英特尔研究院）；University of Central Florida（中佛罗里达大学）
Federated learning (FL) is a distributed machine learning technology for next-generation AI systems that allows a number of workers, i.e., edge devices, collaboratively learn a shared global model while keeping their data locally to prevent privacy leakage. Enabling FL over wireless multi-hop networks can democratize AI and make it accessible in a cost-effective manner. However, the noisy bandwidth-limited multi-hop wireless connections can lead to delayed and nomadic model updates, which significantly slows down the FL convergence speed. To address such challenges, this paper aims to accelera…
Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology（北京信息科学与技术国家研究中心）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
In this paper, we study a federated learning system at the wireless edge that uses over-the-air computation (AirComp). In such a system, users transmit their messages over a multi-access channel concurrently to achieve fast model aggregation. Recently, an AirComp scheme based on digital modulation has been proposed featuring one-bit gradient quantization and truncated channel inversion at users and a majority-voting based decoder at the fusion center (FC). We propose an improved digital AirComp scheme to relax its requirements on the transmitters, where users perform phase correction and trans…
In this paper, we study the problem of federated learning over a wireless channel with user sampling, modeled by a Gaussian multiple access channel, subject to central and local differential privacy (DP/LDP) constraints. It has been shown that the superposition nature of the wireless channel provides a dual benefit of bandwidth efficient gradient aggregation, in conjunction with strong DP guarantees for the users. Specifically, the central DP privacy leakage has been shown to scale as $\mathcal{O}(1/K^{1/2})$, where $K$ is the number of users. It has also been shown that user sampling coupled …
