Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a promising technique for edge devices to collaboratively learn a shared machine learning model while keeping training data locally on the device, thereby removing the need to store and access the full data in the cloud. However, FL is difficult to implement, test and deploy in practice considering heterogeneity in common edge device settings, making it fundamentally hard for researchers to efficiently prototype and test their optimization algorithms. In this work, our aim is to alleviate this problem by introducing FL_PyTorch : a suite of open-source software written in python that builds on top of one the most popular research Deep Learning (DL) framework PyTorch. We built FL_PyTorch as a research simulator for FL to enable fast development, prototyping and experimenting with new and existing FL optimization algorithms. Our system supports abstractions that provide researchers with a sufficient level of flexibility to experiment with existing and novel approaches to advance the state-of-the-art. Furthermore, FL_PyTorch is a simple to use console system, allows to run several clients simultaneously using local CPUs or GPU(s), and even remote compute devices without the need for any distributed implementation provided by the user. FL_PyTorch also offers a Graphical User Interface. For new methods, researchers only provide the centralized implementation of their algorithm. To showcase the possibilities and usefulness of our system, we experiment with several well-known state-of-the-art FL algorithms and a few of the most common FL datasets.
As easy-to-use deep learning libraries such as Tensorflow and Pytorch are popular, it has become convenient to develop machine learning models. Due to privacy issues with centralized machine learning, recently, federated learning in the distributed computing framework is attracting attention. The central server does not collect sensitive and personal data from clients in federated learning, but it only aggregates the model parameters. Though federated learning helps protect privacy, it is difficult for machine learning developers to share the models that they could utilize for different-domain…
Federated learning is a technique that enables distributed clients to collaboratively learn a shared machine learning model while keeping their training data localized. This reduces data privacy risks, however, privacy concerns still exist since it is possible to leak information about the training dataset from the trained model's weights or parameters. Setting up a federated learning environment, especially with security and privacy guarantees, is a time-consuming process with numerous configurations and parameters that can be manipulated. In order to help clients ensure that collaboration is…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）
Federated learning (FL) supports training models on geographically distributed devices. However, traditional FL systems adopt a centralized synchronous strategy, putting high communication pressure and model generalization challenge. Existing optimizations on FL either fail to speedup training on heterogeneous devices or suffer from poor communication efficiency. In this paper, we propose HADFL, a framework that supports decentralized asynchronous training on heterogeneous devices. The devices train model locally with heterogeneity-aware local steps using local data. In each aggregation cycle,…
Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory（约翰斯·霍普金斯应用物理实验室）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）
Federated machine learning is a technique for training a model across multiple devices without exchanging data between them. Because data remains local to each compute node, federated learning is well-suited for use-cases in fields where data is carefully controlled, such as medicine, or in domains with bandwidth constraints. One weakness of this approach is that most federated learning tools rely upon a central server to perform workload delegation and to produce a single shared model. Here, we suggest a flexible framework for decentralizing the federated learning pattern, and provide an open…
Realistic Urban Traffic Generator using Decentralized Federated Learning for the SUMO simulator
Networking Engineering Department, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)（西班牙巴塞罗那理工大学网络工程系）；atlanTTic Research Center (I&C Lab), University of Vigo（西班牙奥维多大学atlanTTic研究中心）；Department of Electrical, Electronic and Telecommunications Engineering, University of Cuenca（厄瓜多尔库恩卡大学电气、电子与电信工程系）
Federated learning (FL) enables resource-constrained edge nodes to collaboratively learn a global model under the orchestration of a central server while keeping privacy-sensitive data locally. The non-independent-and-identically-distributed (non-IID) data samples across participating nodes slow model training and impose additional communication rounds for FL to converge. In this paper, we propose Federated Adaptive Weighting (FedAdp) algorithm that aims to accelerate model convergence under the presence of nodes with non-IID dataset. We observe the implicit connection between the node contrib…
Intel Corporation（英特尔公司）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）
Federated learning (FL) is a computational paradigm that enables organizations to collaborate on machine learning (ML) projects without sharing sensitive data, such as, patient records, financial data, or classified secrets. Open Federated Learning (OpenFL https://github.com/intel/openfl) is an open-source framework for training ML algorithms using the data-private collaborative learning paradigm of FL. OpenFL works with training pipelines built with both TensorFlow and PyTorch, and can be easily extended to other ML and deep learning frameworks. Here, we summarize the motivation and developme…
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；The University of Western Australia（西澳大利亚大学）
Federated learning has been a hot research topic in enabling the collaborative training of machine learning models among different organizations under the privacy restrictions. As researchers try to support more machine learning models with different privacy-preserving approaches, there is a requirement in developing systems and infrastructures to ease the development of various federated learning algorithms. Similar to deep learning systems such as PyTorch and TensorFlow that boost the development of deep learning, federated learning systems (FLSs) are equivalently important, and face challen…
ByzFL: Research Framework for Robust Federated Learning
Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)（巴塞罗那技术大学）；Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)（洛桑联邦理工学院）；Sorbonne Université, Université Paris Cité, CNRS（索邦大学、巴黎cité大学、国家科学研究中心）；Université de Rennes, Inria, CNRS, IRISA（雷恩大学、法国国家科学研究中心、IRISA）
With the increased legislation around data privacy, federated learning (FL) has emerged as a promising technique that allows the clients (end-user) to collaboratively train deep learning (DL) models without transferring and storing the data in a centralized, third-party server. We introduce TorchFL, a performant library for (i) bootstrapping the FL experiments, (ii) executing them using various hardware accelerators, (iii) profiling the performance, and (iv) logging the overall and agent-specific results on the go. Being built on a bottom-up design using PyTorch and Lightning, TorchFL provides…
This paper introduces a Modified User Datagram Protocol (UDP) for Federated Learning to ensure efficiency and reliability in the model parameter transport process, maximizing the potential of the Global model in each Federated Learning round. In developing and testing this protocol, the NS3 simulator is utilized to simulate the packet transport over the network and Google TensorFlow is used to create a custom Federated learning environment. In this preliminary implementation, the simulation contains three nodes where two nodes are client nodes, and one is a server node. The results obtained in…
Asynchronous Federated Learning with non-convex client objective functions and heterogeneous dataset
Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research-UFZ（海德堡环境研究中心-UFZ）；Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, University of Naples（那不勒斯大学电气工程与信息技术系）
KU Leuven（鲁汶大学）；Vector Institute（向量研究所）；NVIDIA（英伟达）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；University of Leeds（利兹大学）
Labelling data is expensive and time consuming especially for domains such as medical imaging that contain volumetric imaging data and require expert knowledge. Exploiting a larger pool of labeled data available across multiple centers, such as in federated learning, has also seen limited success since current deep learning approaches do not generalize well to images acquired with scanners from different manufacturers. We aim to address these problems in a common, learning-based image simulation framework which we refer to as Federated Simulation. We introduce a physics-driven generative appro…
NEC Corporation（日本电气公司）；Samsung Electronics（三星电子）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）
Autonomous vehicles (AVs) must interact with a diverse set of human drivers in heterogeneous geographic areas. Ideally, fleets of AVs should share trajectory data to continually re-train and improve trajectory forecasting models from collective experience using cloud-based distributed learning. At the same time, these robots should ideally avoid uploading raw driver interaction data in order to protect proprietary policies (when sharing insights with other companies) or protect driver privacy from insurance companies. Federated learning (FL) is a popular mechanism to learn models in cloud serv…
The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen)（香港中文大学（深圳））；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）
Federated edge learning (FEEL) is envisioned as a promising paradigm to achieve privacy-preserving distributed learning. However, it consumes excessive learning time due to the existence of straggler devices. In this paper, a novel topology-optimized federated edge learning (TOFEL) scheme is proposed to tackle the heterogeneity issue in federated learning and to improve the communication-and-computation efficiency. Specifically, a problem of jointly optimizing the aggregation topology and computing speed is formulated to minimize the weighted summation of energy consumption and latency. To sol…
Ecole de Technologie Superieure (ETS)（高等技术学院）；Khalifa University（哈利法大学）；Universite de Quebec a Trois-Rivieres (UQTR)（魁北克大学三河分校）；Lebanese American University（黎巴嫩美国大学）；New York University（纽约大学）
Numerous research recently proposed integrating Federated Learning (FL) to address the privacy concerns of using machine learning in privacy-sensitive firms. However, the standards of the available frameworks can no longer sustain the rapid advancement and hinder the integration of FL solutions, which can be prominent in advancing the field. In this paper, we propose ModularFed, a research-focused framework that addresses the complexity of FL implementations and the lack of adaptability and extendability in the available frameworks. We provide a comprehensive architecture that assists FL appro…
University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Intel Corporation（英特尔公司）；Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory（劳伦斯伯克利国家实验室）；CERN（欧洲核子研究组织）；University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）；University of Liège（列日大学）；New York University（纽约大学）
Probabilistic programming languages (PPLs) are receiving widespread attention for performing Bayesian inference in complex generative models. However, applications to science remain limited because of the impracticability of rewriting complex scientific simulators in a PPL, the computational cost of inference, and the lack of scalable implementations. To address these, we present a novel PPL framework that couples directly to existing scientific simulators through a cross-platform probabilistic execution protocol and provides Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and deep-learning-based inference co…
For highly distributed environments such as edge computing, collaborative learning approaches eschew the dependence on a global, shared model, in favor of models tailored for each location. Creating tailored models for individual learning contexts reduces the amount of data transfer, while collaboration among peers provides acceptable model performance. Collaboration assumes, however, the availability of knowledge transfer mechanisms, which are not trivial for deep learning models where knowledge isn't easily attributed to precise model slices. We present Canoe - a framework that facilitates k…
Webank（微众银行）；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
Reinforcement learning (RL) is widely used in autonomous driving tasks and training RL models typically involves in a multi-step process: pre-training RL models on simulators, uploading the pre-trained model to real-life robots, and fine-tuning the weight parameters on robot vehicles. This sequential process is extremely time-consuming and more importantly, knowledge from the fine-tuned model stays local and can not be re-used or leveraged collaboratively. To tackle this problem, we present an online federated RL transfer process for real-time knowledge extraction where all the participant age…
University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Vector Institute（向量研究所）
Reinforcement learning (RL) workloads take a notoriously long time to train due to the large number of samples collected at run-time from simulators. Unfortunately, cluster scale-up approaches remain expensive, and commonly used CPU implementations of simulators induce high overhead when switching back and forth between GPU computations. We explore two optimizations that increase RL data collection efficiency by increasing GPU utilization: (1) GPU vectorization: parallelizing simulation on the GPU for increased hardware parallelism, and (2) simulator kernel fusion: fusing multiple simulation s…
The CycleGAN framework allows for unsupervised image-to-image translation of unpaired data. In a scenario of surgical training on a physical surgical simulator, this method can be used to transform endoscopic images of phantoms into images which more closely resemble the intra-operative appearance of the same surgical target structure. This can be viewed as a novel augmented reality approach, which we coined Hyperrealism in previous work. In this use case, it is of paramount importance to display objects like needles, sutures or instruments consistent in both domains while altering the style t…
Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；TU Delft（代尔夫特理工大学）
Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have been ubiquitously adopted in internet of things and are becoming an integral of our daily life. When tackling the evolving learning tasks in real world, such as classifying different types of objects, DNNs face the challenge to continually retrain themselves according to the tasks on different edge devices. Federated continual learning is a promising technique that offers partial solutions but yet to overcome the following difficulties: the significant accuracy loss due to the limited on-device processing, the negative knowledge transfer caused by the limited c…
While many multi-robot coordination problems can be solved optimally by exact algorithms, solutions are often not scalable in the number of robots. Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) is gaining increasing attention in the robotics community as a promising solution to tackle such problems. Nevertheless, we still lack the tools that allow us to quickly and efficiently find solutions to large-scale collective learning tasks. In this work, we introduce the Vectorized Multi-Agent Simulator (VMAS). VMAS is an open-source framework designed for efficient MARL benchmarking. It is comprised of a…
Decentralized Rank Scheduling for Energy-Constrained Multi-Task Federated Fine-Tuning in Edge-Assisted IoV Networks
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学计算机科学与工程学院）；School of Cyber Science and Technology, Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学网络安全科学与技术学院）
Passive Inference Attacks on Split Learning via Adversarial Regularization
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）；Renmin University of China（中国人民大学）
TU Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；Center of Advanced European Studies Research (caesar)（欧洲高级研究中心）；Helmholtz-Zentrum Geesthacht（盖斯特哈赫特亥姆霍兹研究中心）；University of Tübingen（蒂宾根大学）；Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）
Scientists and engineers employ stochastic numerical simulators to model empirically observed phenomena. In contrast to purely statistical models, simulators express scientific principles that provide powerful inductive biases, improve generalization to new data or scenarios and allow for fewer, more interpretable and domain-relevant parameters. Despite these advantages, tuning a simulator's parameters so that its outputs match data is challenging. Simulation-based inference (SBI) seeks to identify parameter sets that a) are compatible with prior knowledge and b) match empirical observations. …
PennyLane is a Python 3 software framework for differentiable programming of quantum computers. The library provides a unified architecture for near-term quantum computing devices, supporting both qubit and continuous-variable paradigms. PennyLane's core feature is the ability to compute gradients of variational quantum circuits in a way that is compatible with classical techniques such as backpropagation. PennyLane thus extends the automatic differentiation algorithms common in optimization and machine learning to include quantum and hybrid computations. A plugin system makes the framework co…
