Federated Learning (FL) is an emerging distributed learning paradigm under privacy constraint. Data heterogeneity is one of the main challenges in FL, which results in slow convergence and degraded performance. Most existing approaches only tackle the heterogeneity challenge by restricting the local model update in client, ignoring the performance drop caused by direct global model aggregation. Instead, we propose a data-free knowledge distillation method to fine-tune the global model in the server (FedFTG), which relieves the issue of direct model aggregation. Concretely, FedFTG explores the input space of local models through a generator, and uses it to transfer the knowledge from local models to the global model. Besides, we propose a hard sample mining scheme to achieve effective knowledge distillation throughout the training. In addition, we develop customized label sampling and class-level ensemble to derive maximum utilization of knowledge, which implicitly mitigates the distribution discrepancy across clients. Extensive experiments show that our FedFTG significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) FL algorithms and can serve as a strong plugin for enhancing FedAvg, FedProx, FedDyn, and SCAFFOLD.
FPPL: An Efficient and Non-IID Robust Federated Continual Learning Framework
School of Computer Science and Technology, East China Normal University（华东师范大学计算机科学与技术学院）；School of Software Engineering, TongJi University（同济大学软件工程学院）
VinUniversity（Vin大学）；National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology（日本产业技术综合研究所）
The uneven distribution of local data across different edge devices (clients) results in slow model training and accuracy reduction in federated learning. Naive federated learning (FL) strategy and most alternative solutions attempted to achieve more fairness by weighted aggregating deep learning models across clients. This work introduces a novel non-IID type encountered in real-world datasets, namely cluster-skew, in which groups of clients have local data with similar distributions, causing the global model to converge to an over-fitted solution. To deal with non-IID data, particularly the …
Pusan National University（釜山国立大学）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）；University of Warwick（华威大学）
In real-world applications, Federated Learning (FL) meets two challenges: (1) scalability, especially when applied to massive IoT networks; and (2) how to be robust against an environment with heterogeneous data. Realizing the first problem, we aim to design a novel FL framework named Full-stack FL (F2L). More specifically, F2L utilizes a hierarchical network architecture, making extending the FL network accessible without reconstructing the whole network system. Moreover, leveraging the advantages of hierarchical network design, we propose a new label-driven knowledge distillation (LKD) techn…
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Lehigh University（理海大学）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）
Federated learning enables multiple clients to collaboratively learn a global model by periodically aggregating the clients' models without transferring the local data. However, due to the heterogeneity of the system and data, many approaches suffer from the "client-drift" issue that could significantly slow down the convergence of the global model training. As clients perform local updates on heterogeneous data through heterogeneous systems, their local models drift apart. To tackle this issue, one intuitive idea is to guide the local model training by the global teachers, i.e., past global m…
University of Maryland（马里兰大学）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）
Numerous large-scale chest x-ray datasets have spearheaded expert-level detection of abnormalities using deep learning. However, these datasets focus on detecting a subset of disease labels that could be present, thus making them distributed and non-iid with partial labels. Recent literature has indicated the impact of batch normalization layers on the convergence of federated learning due to domain shift associated with non-iid data with partial labels. To that end, we propose FedFBN, a federated learning framework that draws inspiration from transfer learning by using pretrained networks as …
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；University of Hamburg（汉堡大学）；Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg（埃尔朗根-纽伦堡弗里德里希-亚历山大大学）
Federated learning has faced performance and network communication challenges, especially in the environments where the data is not independent and identically distributed (IID) across the clients. To address the former challenge, we introduce the federated-centralized concordance property and show that the federated single-mini-batch training approach can achieve comparable performance as the corresponding centralized training in the Non-IID environments. To deal with the latter, we present the federated multi-mini-batch approach and illustrate that it can establish a trade-off between the pe…
Xiamen University（厦门大学）；Hong Kong Baptist University（香港浸会大学）
Federated learning provides a privacy guarantee for generating good deep learning models on distributed clients with different kinds of data. Nevertheless, dealing with non-IID data is one of the most challenging problems for federated learning. Researchers have proposed a variety of methods to eliminate the negative influence of non-IIDness. However, they only focus on the non-IID data provided that the universal class distribution is balanced. In many real-world applications, the universal class distribution is long-tailed, which causes the model seriously biased. Therefore, this paper studi…
We present a federated learning approach for learning a client adaptable, robust model when data is non-identically and non-independently distributed (non-IID) across clients. By simulating heterogeneous clients, we show that adding learned client-specific conditioning improves model performance, and the approach is shown to work on balanced and imbalanced data set from both audio and image domains. The client adaptation is implemented by a conditional gated activation unit and is particularly beneficial when there are large differences between the data distribution for each client, a common s…
Warsaw University of Technology（华沙理工大学）；Systems Research Institute Polish Academy of Sciences（波兰科学院系统研究所）
One of the important problems in federated learning is how to deal with unbalanced data. This contribution introduces a novel technique designed to deal with label skewed non-IID data, using adversarial inputs, created by the I-FGSM method. Adversarial inputs guide the training process and allow the Weighted Federated Averaging to give more importance to clients with 'selected' local label distributions. Experimental results, gathered from image classification tasks, for MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets, are reported and analyzed.
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）
Federated learning (FL) has been a promising approach in the field of medical imaging in recent years. A critical problem in FL, specifically in medical scenarios is to have a more accurate shared model which is robust to noisy and out-of distribution clients. In this work, we tackle the problem of statistical heterogeneity in data for FL which is highly plausible in medical data where for example the data comes from different sites with different scanner settings. We propose IDA (Inverse Distance Aggregation), a novel adaptive weighting approach for clients based on meta-information which han…
Federated learning is an emerging distributed machine learning framework for privacy preservation. However, models trained in federated learning usually have worse performance than those trained in the standard centralized learning mode, especially when the training data are not independent and identically distributed (Non-IID) on the local devices. In this survey, we pro-vide a detailed analysis of the influence of Non-IID data on both parametric and non-parametric machine learning models in both horizontal and vertical federated learning. In addition, cur-rent research work on handling chall…
Generalizable Hyperparameter Optimization for Federated Learning on Non-IID Cancer Images
Institute of Exact and Technological Sciences, Federal University of Viçosa - UFV, Rio Paranaíba-MG, Brazil（精确与技术科学研究所，弗拉维亚联邦大学-UFV，里奥帕拉纳伊巴-巴西）；Department of Computing, Federal University of São Carlos, São Carlos-SP, Brazil（计算系，圣卡洛斯联邦大学，圣卡洛斯-巴西）
Federated learning refers to the task of machine learning based on decentralized data from multiple clients with secured data privacy. Recent studies show that quantum algorithms can be exploited to boost its performance. However, when the clients' data are not independent and identically distributed (IID), the performance of conventional federated algorithms is known to deteriorate. In this work, we explore the non-IID issue in quantum federated learning with both theoretical and numerical analysis. We further prove that a global quantum channel can be exactly decomposed into local channels t…
Federated learning allows loads of edge computing devices to collaboratively learn a global model without data sharing. The analysis with partial device participation under non-IID and unbalanced data reflects more reality. In this work, we propose federated learning versions of adaptive gradient methods - Federated AGMs - which employ both the first-order and second-order momenta, to alleviate generalization performance deterioration caused by dissimilarity of data population among devices. To further improve the test performance, we compare several schemes of calibration for the adaptive lea…
Academy of Arts and Design, Tsinghua University（清华大学美术学院）；The Future Laboratory, Tsinghua University（清华大学未来实验室）；University of Huddersfield（哈德斯菲尔德大学）；University of California San Diego（加利福尼亚大学圣迭戈分校）；Northeastern University（东北大学）；Massachusetts General Hospital（麻省总医院）；Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）
Intensive care data are valuable for improvement of health care, policy making and many other purposes. Vast amount of such data are stored in different locations, on many different devices and in different data silos. Sharing data among different sources is a big challenge due to regulatory, operational and security reasons. One potential solution is federated machine learning, which is a method that sends machine learning algorithms simultaneously to all data sources, trains models in each source and aggregates the learned models. This strategy allows utilization of valuable data without mov…
Despite federated learning endows distributed clients with a cooperative training mode under the premise of protecting data privacy and security, the clients are still vulnerable when encountering adversarial samples due to the lack of robustness. The adversarial samples can confuse and cheat the client models to achieve malicious purposes via injecting elaborate noise into normal input. In this paper, we introduce a novel Ensemble Federated Adversarial Training Method, termed as EFAT, that enables an efficacious and robust coupled training mechanism. Our core idea is to enhance the diversity …
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology（韩国科学技术院）
Federated learning has emerged as a new paradigm of collaborative machine learning; however, it has also faced several challenges such as non-independent and identically distributed(IID) data and high communication cost. To this end, we propose a novel framework of IID and communication-aware group federated learning that simultaneously maximizes both accuracy and communication speed by grouping nodes based on data distributions and physical locations of the nodes. Furthermore, we provide a formal convergence analysis and an efficient optimization algorithm called FedAvg-IC. Experimental resul…
Shell Global Solutions International B.V.（壳牌全球解决方案国际有限公司）；Delft University of Technology (TU Delft)（代尔夫特理工大学）；Myant Inc.（迈安特公司）
Classical federated learning approaches incur significant performance degradation in the presence of non-IID client data. A possible direction to address this issue is forming clusters of clients with roughly IID data. Most solutions following this direction are iterative and relatively slow, also prone to convergence issues in discovering underlying cluster formations. We introduce federated learning with taskonomy (FLT) that generalizes this direction by learning the task-relatedness between clients for more efficient federated aggregation of heterogeneous data. In a one-off process, the ser…
Key Laboratory of Embedded System and Service Computing (Tongji University), Ministry of Education（嵌入式系统与服务计算教育部重点实验室（同济大学））
Federated learning is a novel framework that enables resource-constrained edge devices to jointly learn a model, which solves the problem of data protection and data islands. However, standard federated learning is vulnerable to Byzantine attacks, which will cause the global model to be manipulated by the attacker or fail to converge. On non-iid data, the current methods are not effective in defensing against Byzantine attacks. In this paper, we propose a Byzantine-robust framework for federated learning via credibility assessment on non-iid data (BRCA). Credibility assessment is designed to d…
Federated learning enables resource-constrained edge compute devices, such as mobile phones and IoT devices, to learn a shared model for prediction, while keeping the training data local. This decentralized approach to train models provides privacy, security, regulatory and economic benefits. In this work, we focus on the statistical challenge of federated learning when local data is non-IID. We first show that the accuracy of federated learning reduces significantly, by up to 55% for neural networks trained for highly skewed non-IID data, where each client device trains only on a single class…
Federated learning (FL) is an emerging technique used to collaboratively train a global machine learning model while keeping the data localized on the user devices. The main obstacle to FL's practical implementation is the Non-Independent and Identical (Non-IID) data distribution across users, which slows convergence and degrades performance. To tackle this fundamental issue, we propose a method (ComFed) that enhances the whole training process on both the client and server sides. The key idea of ComFed is to simultaneously utilize client-variance reduction techniques to facilitate server aggr…
As a mechanism for devices to update a global model without sharing data, federated learning bridges the tension between the need for data and respect for privacy. However, classic FL methods like Federated Averaging struggle with non-iid data, a prevalent situation in the real world. Previous solutions are sub-optimal as they either employ a small shared global subset of data or greater number of models with increased communication costs. We propose FedFMC (Fork-Merge-Consolidate), a method that dynamically forks devices into updating different global models then merges and consolidates separ…
Pennsylvania State University（宾夕法尼亚州立大学）；IBM Research - Almaden（IBM阿尔马登研究中心）
Federated Learning (FL) is a paradigm for jointly training machine learning algorithms in a decentralized manner which allows for parties to communicate with an aggregator to create and train a model, without exposing the underlying raw data distribution of the local parties involved in the training process. Most research in FL has been focused on Neural Network-based approaches, however Tree-Based methods, such as XGBoost, have been underexplored in Federated Learning due to the challenges in overcoming the iterative and additive characteristics of the algorithm. Decision tree-based models, i…
Indian Institute of Information Technology Kottayam (IIITK)（印度信息技术学院科塔亚姆分校（IIITK））；International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad (IIITH)（印度信息技术学院海得拉巴分校（IIITH））
Federated learning allows multiple clients to collaborate to train high-performance deep learning models while keeping the training data locally. However, when the local data of all clients are not independent and identically distributed (i.e., non-IID), it is challenging to implement this form of efficient collaborative learning. Although significant efforts have been dedicated to addressing this challenge, the effect on the image classification task is still not satisfactory. In this paper, we propose FedProc: prototypical contrastive federated learning, which is a simple and effective feder…
A central challenge in training classification models in the real-world federated system is learning with non-IID data. To cope with this, most of the existing works involve enforcing regularization in local optimization or improving the model aggregation scheme at the server. Other works also share public datasets or synthesized samples to supplement the training of under-represented classes or introduce a certain level of personalization. Though effective, they lack a deep understanding of how the data heterogeneity affects each layer of a deep classification model. In this paper, we bridge …
Tackling Non-IIDness in HAPS-Aided Federated Learning
Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTN) Lab, Department of Systems and Computer Engineering, Carleton University（卡尔顿大学系统与计算机工程系非地面网络实验室）；School of EECS, Ohio University（俄亥俄大学电气工程与计算机科学学院）
East China Normal University（华东师范大学）；Zaozhuang University（枣庄学院）；University of Houston（休斯顿大学）
As a promising method of central model training on decentralized device data while securing user privacy, Federated Learning (FL)is becoming popular in Internet of Things (IoT) design. However, when the data collected by IoT devices are highly skewed in a non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) manner, the accuracy of vanilla FL method cannot be guaranteed. Although there exist various solutions that try to address the bottleneck of FL with non-IID data, most of them suffer from extra intolerable communication overhead and low model accuracy. To enable fast and accurate FL, this …
Federated learning (FL) is a well established method for performing machine learning tasks over massively distributed data. However in settings where data is distributed in a non-iid (not independent and identically distributed) fashion -- as is typical in real world situations -- the joint model produced by FL suffers in terms of test set accuracy and/or communication costs compared to training on iid data. We show that learning a single joint model is often not optimal in the presence of certain types of non-iid data. In this work we present a modification to FL by introducing a hierarchical…
Federated learning has been widely applied to enable decentralized devices, which each have their own local data, to learn a shared model. However, learning from real-world data can be challenging, as it is rarely identically and independently distributed (IID) across edge devices (a key assumption for current high-performing and low-bandwidth algorithms). We present a novel approach, FedCD, which clones and deletes models to dynamically group devices with similar data. Experiments on the CIFAR-10 dataset show that FedCD achieves higher accuracy and faster convergence compared to a FedAvg base…
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
Federated learning (FL) has recently emerged as a popular privacy-preserving collaborative learning paradigm. However, it suffers from the non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) data among clients. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, named Synthetic Data Aided Federated Learning (SDA-FL), to resolve this non-IID challenge by sharing synthetic data. Specifically, each client pretrains a local generative adversarial network (GAN) to generate differentially private synthetic data, which are uploaded to the parameter server (PS) to construct a global shared synthetic datase…
Although federated learning (FL) has recently been proposed for efficient distributed training and data privacy protection, it still encounters many obstacles. One of these is the naturally existing statistical heterogeneity among clients, making local data distributions non independently and identically distributed (i.e., non-iid), which poses challenges for model aggregation and personalization. For FL with a deep neural network (DNN), privatizing some layers is a simple yet effective solution for non-iid problems. However, which layers should we privatize to facilitate the learning process?…
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；The University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）；Zhongnan Univeristy of Economics and Law（中南财经政法大学）；Institute for AI in Medicine (IKIM) at UK Essen（埃森大学医院医学人工智能研究所（IKIM））；Ruhr-University Bochum（波鸿鲁尔大学）；Monash University（莫纳什大学）
How to tackle non-iid data is a crucial topic in federated learning. This challenging problem not only affects training process, but also harms performance of clients not participating in training. Existing literature mainly focuses on either side, yet still lacks a unified solution to handle these two types (internal and external) of clients in a joint way. In this work, we propose a unified framework to tackle the non-iid issues for internal and external clients together. Firstly, we propose to use client-specific batch normalization in either internal or external clients to alleviate featur…
University of Luxembourg（卢森堡大学）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学）
Federated learning allows clients to collaboratively train models on datasets that are acquired in different locations and that cannot be exchanged because of their size or regulations. Such collected data is increasingly non-independent and non-identically distributed (non-IID), negatively affecting training accuracy. Previous works tried to mitigate the effects of non-IID datasets on training accuracy, focusing mainly on non-IID labels, however practical datasets often also contain non-IID features. To address both non-IID labels and features, we propose FedGMCC, a novel framework where a ce…
Localization and tracking of objects using data-driven methods is a popular topic due to the complexity in characterizing the physics of wireless channel propagation models. In these modeling approaches, data needs to be gathered to accurately train models, at the same time that user's privacy is maintained. An appealing scheme to cooperatively achieve these goals is known as Federated Learning (FL). A challenge in FL schemes is the presence of non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) data, caused by unevenly exploration of different areas. In this paper, we consider the use of re…
Federated Learning allows training of data stored in distributed devices without the need for centralizing training data, thereby maintaining data privacy. Addressing the ability to handle data heterogeneity (non-identical and independent distribution or non-IID) is a key enabler for the wider deployment of Federated Learning. In this paper, we propose a novel Divide-and-Conquer training methodology that enables the use of the popular FedAvg aggregation algorithm by overcoming the acknowledged FedAvg limitations in non-IID environments. We propose a novel use of Cosine-distance based Weight Di…
RISE Research Institutes of Sweden（瑞典RISE研究院）；Chalmers University of Technology（查尔姆斯理工大学）；KTH Royal Institute of Technology（KTH皇家理工学院）
We tackle the non-convex problem of learning a personalized deep learning model in a decentralized setting. More specifically, we study decentralized federated learning, a peer-to-peer setting where data is distributed among many clients and where there is no central server to orchestrate the training. In real world scenarios, the data distributions are often heterogeneous between clients. Therefore, in this work we study the problem of how to efficiently learn a model in a peer-to-peer system with non-iid client data. We propose a method named Performance-Based Neighbor Selection (PENS) where…
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；Singapore University of Technology and Design（新加坡科技设计大学）
This paper proposes a client selection (CS) method to tackle the communication bottleneck of federated learning (FL) while concurrently coping with FL's data heterogeneity issue. Specifically, we first analyze the effect of CS in FL and show that FL training can be accelerated by adequately choosing participants to diversify the training dataset in each round of training. Based on this, we leverage data profiling and determinantal point process (DPP) sampling techniques to develop an algorithm termed Federated Learning with DPP-based Participant Selection (FL-DP$^3$S). This algorithm effective…
