Federated learning has emerged as a new paradigm of collaborative machine learning; however, many prior studies have used global aggregation along a star topology without much consideration of the communication scalability or the diurnal property relied on clients' local time variety. In contrast, ring architecture can resolve the scalability issue and even satisfy the diurnal property by iterating nodes without an aggregation. Nevertheless, such ring-based algorithms can inherently suffer from the high-variance problem. To this end, we propose a novel algorithm called TornadoAggregate that improves both accuracy and scalability by facilitating the ring architecture. In particular, to improve the accuracy, we reformulate the loss minimization into a variance reduction problem and establish three principles to reduce variance: Ring-Aware Grouping, Small Ring, and Ring Chaining. Experimental results show that TornadoAggregate improved the test accuracy by up to 26.7% and achieved near-linear scalability.
Federated machine learning has great promise to overcome the input privacy challenge in machine learning. The appearance of several projects capable of simulating federated learning has led to a corresponding rapid progress on algorithmic aspects of the problem. However, there is still a lack of federated machine learning frameworks that focus on fundamental aspects such as scalability, robustness, security, and performance in a geographically distributed setting. To bridge this gap we have designed and developed the FEDn framework. A main feature of FEDn is to support both cross-device and cr…
The University of Texas at San Antonio（德克萨斯大学圣安东尼奥分校）
Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative model training without centralizing data. However, the traditional FL framework is cloud-based and suffers from high communication latency. On the other hand, the edge-based FL framework that relies on an edge server co-located with mobile base station for model aggregation has low communication latency but suffers from degraded model accuracy due to the limited coverage of edge server. In light of high accuracy but high-latency cloud-based FL and low-latency but low-accuracy edge-based FL, this paper proposes a new FL framework based on cooperativ…
In classical federated learning, the clients contribute to the overall training by communicating local updates for the underlying model on their private data to a coordinating server. However, updating and communicating the entire model becomes prohibitively expensive when resource-constrained clients collectively aim to train a large machine learning model. Split learning provides a natural solution in such a setting, where only a small part of the model is stored and trained on clients while the remaining large part of the model only stays at the servers. However, the model partitioning empl…
Cross-device Federated Learning (FL) is a distributed learning paradigm with several challenges that differentiate it from traditional distributed learning, variability in the system characteristics on each device, and millions of clients coordinating with a central server being primary ones. Most FL systems described in the literature are synchronous - they perform a synchronized aggregation of model updates from individual clients. Scaling synchronous FL is challenging since increasing the number of clients training in parallel leads to diminishing returns in training speed, analogous to lar…
Microsoft Research（微软研究院）；University of California, San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）
In this paper we introduce "Federated Learning Utilities and Tools for Experimentation" (FLUTE), a high-performance open-source platform for federated learning research and offline simulations. The goal of FLUTE is to enable rapid prototyping and simulation of new federated learning algorithms at scale, including novel optimization, privacy, and communications strategies. We describe the architecture of FLUTE, enabling arbitrary federated modeling schemes to be realized. We compare the platform with other state-of-the-art platforms and describe available features of FLUTE for experimentation i…
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）；Petuum Inc.（Petuum公司）
The canonical formulation of federated learning treats it as a distributed optimization problem where the model parameters are optimized against a global loss function that decomposes across client loss functions. A recent alternative formulation instead treats federated learning as a distributed inference problem, where the goal is to infer a global posterior from partitioned client data (Al-Shedivat et al., 2021). This paper extends the inference view and describes a variational inference formulation of federated learning where the goal is to find a global variational posterior that well-app…
Scalable Federated Learning for Clients with Different Input Image Sizes and Numbers of Output Categories
Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo（东京大学信息科学与技术研究生院）；Center for Advanced Intelligence Project, RIKEN（理化学研究所先进智能项目中心）
Viterbi School of Engineering（维特比工程学院）；University of Southern California（南加州大学）
In Federated Learning, a common approach for aggregating local models across clients is periodic averaging of the full model parameters. It is, however, known that different layers of neural networks can have a different degree of model discrepancy across the clients. The conventional full aggregation scheme does not consider such a difference and synchronizes the whole model parameters at once, resulting in inefficient network bandwidth consumption. Aggregating the parameters that are similar across the clients does not make meaningful training progress while increasing the communication cost…
Auxo: Efficient Federated Learning via Scalable Client Clustering
University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Princeton University（普林斯顿大学）；University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；University of Southern California（南加州大学）
Learning from data owned by several parties, as in federated learning, raises challenges regarding the privacy guarantees provided to participants and the correctness of the computation in the presence of malicious parties. We tackle these challenges in the context of distributed averaging, an essential building block of federated learning algorithms. Our first contribution is a scalable protocol in which participants exchange correlated Gaussian noise along the edges of a network graph, complemented by independent noise added by each party. We analyze the differential privacy guarantees of ou…
Optimizing Federated Learning for Scalable Power-demand Forecasting in Microgrids
Department of Computational and Data Sciences, Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, India（计算与数据科学系，印度科学研究院（IISc），班加罗尔，印度）；Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, India（电气工程系，印度科学研究院（IISc），班加罗尔，印度）；Accenture, India（印度德勤）
Hong Kong Baptist University（香港浸会大学）；FedML Inc.（FedML公司）；Inha University（仁荷大学）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborations among clients for train machine learning models while protecting their data privacy. Existing FL simulation platforms that are designed from the perspectives of traditional distributed training, suffer from laborious code migration between simulation and production, low efficiency, low GPU utility, low scalability with high hardware requirements and difficulty of simulating stateful clients. In this work, we firstly demystify the challenges and bottlenecks of simulating FL, and design a new FL system named as FedML \texttt{Parrot}. It improves the…
Federated prediction for scalable and privacy-preserved knowledge-based planning in radiotherapy
Department of Radiation Oncology, Columbia University Irving Medical Center（放射肿瘤学系，哥伦比亚大学伊文思医疗中心）；Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center, Columbia University（赫伯特·伊文思综合癌症中心，哥伦比亚大学）；Data Science Institute, Columbia University（数据科学研究所，哥伦比亚大学）
Scalable Cross-Facility Federated Learning for Scientific Foundation Models on Multiple Supercomputers
Mathematics and Computer Science Division, Argonne National Laboratory（阿贡国家实验室数学与计算机科学 division）；Data Science and Learning Division, Argonne National Laboratory（阿贡国家实验室数据科学与学习 division）；Department of Computer Science, University of Chicago（芝加哥大学计算机科学系）
Federated Learning is a distributed machine learning approach which enables model training on a large corpus of decentralized data. We have built a scalable production system for Federated Learning in the domain of mobile devices, based on TensorFlow. In this paper, we describe the resulting high-level design, sketch some of the challenges and their solutions, and touch upon the open problems and future directions.
LLMs meet Federated Learning for Scalable and Secure IoT Management
School of Computer Science and Technology, Algoma University（计算机科学与技术学院，阿尔戈马大学）；School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Ottawa（电气工程与计算机科学学院，渥太华大学）
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-…
Scalable Vertical Federated Learning via Data Augmentation and Amortized Inference
Centre for Data Science, Queensland University of Technology（昆士兰科技大学数据科学中心）；School of Mathematical Sciences, Queensland University of Technology（昆士兰科技大学数学科学学院）；Euler Institute, Università della Svizzera italiana (USI)（瑞士意大利语区大学欧拉研究所）；Insubria University（因苏布里亚大学）
University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）
We present FedScale, a federated learning (FL) benchmarking suite with realistic datasets and a scalable runtime to enable reproducible FL research. FedScale datasets encompass a wide range of critical FL tasks, ranging from image classification and object detection to language modeling and speech recognition. Each dataset comes with a unified evaluation protocol using real-world data splits and evaluation metrics. To reproduce realistic FL behavior, FedScale contains a scalable and extensible runtime. It provides high-level APIs to implement FL algorithms, deploy them at scale across diverse …
Due to the veracity and heterogeneity in network traffic, detecting anomalous events is challenging. The computational load on global servers is a significant challenge in terms of efficiency, accuracy, and scalability. Our primary motivation is to introduce a robust and scalable framework that enables efficient network anomaly detection. We address the issue of scalability and efficiency for network anomaly detection by leveraging federated learning, in which multiple participants train a global model jointly. Unlike centralized training architectures, federated learning does not require part…
The traditional cloud-centric approach for Deep Learning (DL) requires training data to be collected and processed at a central server which is often challenging in privacy-sensitive domains like healthcare. Towards this, a new learning paradigm called Federated Learning (FL) has been proposed that brings the potential of DL to these domains while addressing privacy and data ownership issues. FL enables remote clients to learn a shared ML model while keeping the data local. However, conventional FL systems face several challenges such as scalability, complex infrastructure management, and wast…
Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathematics ITWM（弗劳恩霍夫工业数学研究所ITWM）
Federated Learning as a decentralized artificial intelligence (AI) solution solves a variety of problems in industrial applications. It enables a continuously self-improving AI, which can be deployed everywhere at the edge. However, bringing AI to production for generating a real business impact is a challenging task. Especially in the case of Federated Learning, expertise and resources from multiple domains are required to realize its full potential. Having this in mind we have developed an innovative Federated Learning framework FACT based on Fed-DART, enabling an easy and scalable deploymen…
Towards Scalable Wireless Federated Learning: Challenges and Solutions
ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学）；Nanjing University（南京大学）；Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；Xiameng University（厦门大学）；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））
As there is a growing interest in utilizing data across multiple resources to build better machine learning models, many vertically federated learning algorithms have been proposed to preserve the data privacy of the participating organizations. However, the efficiency of existing vertically federated learning algorithms remains to be a big problem, especially when applied to large-scale real-world datasets. In this paper, we present a fast, accurate, scalable and yet robust system for vertically federated random forest. With extensive optimization, we achieved $5\times$ and $83\times$ speed u…
We design a scalable algorithm to privately generate location heatmaps over decentralized data from millions of user devices. It aims to ensure differential privacy before data becomes visible to a service provider while maintaining high data accuracy and minimizing resource consumption on users' devices. To achieve this, we revisit distributed differential privacy based on recent results in secure multiparty computation, and we design a scalable and adaptive distributed differential privacy approach for location analytics. Evaluation on public location datasets shows that this approach succes…
Recent attacks on federated learning demonstrate that keeping the training data on clients' devices does not provide sufficient privacy, as the model parameters shared by clients can leak information about their training data. A 'secure aggregation' protocol enables the server to aggregate clients' models in a privacy-preserving manner. However, existing secure aggregation protocols incur high computation/communication costs, especially when the number of model parameters is larger than the number of clients participating in an iteration -- a typical scenario in federated learning. In this pap…
Fair prediction across protected groups is an important constraint for many federated learning applications. However, prior work studying group fair federated learning lacks formal convergence or fairness guarantees. In this work we propose a general framework for provably fair federated learning. In particular, we explore and extend the notion of Bounded Group Loss as a theoretically-grounded approach for group fairness. Using this setup, we propose a scalable federated optimization method that optimizes the empirical risk under a number of group fairness constraints. We provide convergence g…
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Samsung AI Center（三星人工智能中心）；The University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；Westlake University（西湖大学）；The University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）
Federated learning has been predominantly concerned with collaborative training of deep networks from scratch, and especially the many challenges that arise, such as communication cost, robustness to heterogeneous data, and support for diverse device capabilities. However, there is no unified framework that addresses all these problems together. This paper studies the challenges and opportunities of exploiting pre-trained Transformer models in FL. In particular, we propose to efficiently adapt such pre-trained models by injecting a novel attention-based adapter module at each transformer block…
