Many compression techniques have been proposed to reduce the communication overhead of Federated Learning training procedures. However, these are typically designed for compressing model updates, which are expected to decay throughout training. As a result, such methods are inapplicable to downlink (i.e., from the parameter server to clients) compression in the cross-device setting, where heterogeneous clients $\textit{may appear only once}$ during training and thus must download the model parameters. Accordingly, we propose $\textsf{DoCoFL}$ -- a new framework for downlink compression in the cross-device setting. Importantly, $\textsf{DoCoFL}$ can be seamlessly combined with many uplink compression schemes, rendering it suitable for bi-directional compression. Through extensive evaluation, we show that $\textsf{DoCoFL}$ offers significant bi-directional bandwidth reduction while achieving competitive accuracy to that of a baseline without any compression.
Yonsei University（延世大学）；Deakin University（迪肯大学）；Samsung Research, Samsung Electronics（三星电子三星研究院）；University of Oulu（奥卢大学）
This letter proposes a novel communication-efficient and privacy-preserving distributed machine learning framework, coined Mix2FLD. To address uplink-downlink capacity asymmetry, local model outputs are uploaded to a server in the uplink as in federated distillation (FD), whereas global model parameters are downloaded in the downlink as in federated learning (FL). This requires a model output-to-parameter conversion at the server, after collecting additional data samples from devices. To preserve privacy while not compromising accuracy, linearly mixed-up local samples are uploaded, and inverse…
Princeton University（普林斯顿大学）；Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）
We study federated learning (FL), where power-limited wireless devices utilize their local datasets to collaboratively train a global model with the help of a remote parameter server (PS). The PS has access to the global model and shares it with the devices for local training, and the devices return the result of their local updates to the PS to update the global model. This framework requires downlink transmission from the PS to the devices and uplink transmission from the devices to the PS. The goal of this study is to investigate the impact of the bandwidth-limited shared wireless medium in…
Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；University of Virginia（弗吉尼亚大学）
Communication has been known to be one of the primary bottlenecks of federated learning (FL), and yet existing studies have not addressed the efficient communication design, particularly in wireless FL where both uplink and downlink communications have to be considered. In this paper, we focus on the design and analysis of physical layer quantization and transmission methods for wireless FL. We answer the question of what and how to communicate between clients and the parameter server and evaluate the impact of the various quantization and transmission options of the updated model on the learn…
Communication-Efficient and Differentially Private Vertical Federated Learning with Zeroth-Order Optimization
Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue University（电气与计算机工程学院，普渡大学）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Yonsei University（计算机科学与工程系，延世大学）
ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学）；Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院上海微系统与信息技术研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学）
Federated learning (FL) over resource-constrained wireless networks has recently attracted much attention. However, most existing studies consider one FL task in single-cell wireless networks and ignore the impact of downlink/uplink inter-cell interference on the learning performance. In this paper, we investigate FL over a multi-cell wireless network, where each cell performs a different FL task and over-the-air computation (AirComp) is adopted to enable fast uplink gradient aggregation. We conduct convergence analysis of AirComp-assisted FL systems, taking into account the inter-cell interfe…
Yonsei University（延世大学）；Korea Maritime and Ocean University（韩国海洋大学）；Deakin University（迪肯大学）；University of Oulu（奥卢大学）
The lottery ticket hypothesis (LTH) claims that a deep neural network (i.e., ground network) contains a number of subnetworks (i.e., winning tickets), each of which exhibiting identically accurate inference capability as that of the ground network. Federated learning (FL) has recently been applied in LotteryFL to discover such winning tickets in a distributed way, showing higher accuracy multi-task learning than Vanilla FL. Nonetheless, LotteryFL relies on unicast transmission on the downlink, and ignores mitigating stragglers, questioning scalability. Motivated by this, in this article we pro…
University of Virginia（弗吉尼亚大学）；The Pennsylvania State University（宾夕法尼亚州立大学）；Princeton University（普林斯顿大学）
We propose a novel communication design, termed random orthogonalization, for federated learning (FL) in a massive multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) wireless system. The key novelty of random orthogonalization comes from the tight coupling of FL and two unique characteristics of massive MIMO -- channel hardening and favorable propagation. As a result, random orthogonalization can achieve natural over-the-air model aggregation without requiring transmitter side channel state information (CSI) for the uplink phase of FL, while significantly reducing the channel estimation overhead at the…
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…
EURECOM（欧洲通信系统工程学院）；Mitsubishi Electric R&D Centre Europe（三菱电机欧洲研发中心）
Data heterogeneity across participating devices poses one of the main challenges in federated learning as it has been shown to greatly hamper its convergence time and generalization capabilities. In this work, we address this limitation by enabling personalization using multiple user-centric aggregation rules at the parameter server. Our approach potentially produces a personalized model for each user at the cost of some extra downlink communication overhead. To strike a trade-off between personalization and communication efficiency, we propose a broadcast protocol that limits the number of pe…
University of Southern California（南加州大学）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）
Large-scale deployments of low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites collect massive amount of Earth imageries and sensor data, which can empower machine learning (ML) to address global challenges such as real-time disaster navigation and mitigation. However, it is often infeasible to download all the high-resolution images and train these ML models on the ground because of limited downlink bandwidth, sparse connectivity, and regularization constraints on the imagery resolution. To address these challenges, we leverage Federated Learning (FL), where ground stations and satellites collaboratively train …
Queen’s University Belfast（贝尔法斯特女王大学）；New York University（纽约大学）
Federated learning (FL) has been considered as a promising learning framework for future machine learning systems due to its privacy preservation and communication efficiency. In beyond-5G/6G systems, it is likely to have multiple FL groups with different learning purposes. This scenario leads to a question: How does a wireless network support multiple FL groups? As an answer, we first propose to use a cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) network to guarantee the stable operation of multiple FL processes by letting the iterations of these FL processes be executed together wi…
Communication-Efficient Personalized Federated Learning via Layer-Wise Multi-Threshold Random Sketching
School of Artificial Intelligence, Xidian University（西安电子科技大学人工智能学院）；School of Automation, Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学自动化学院）；Faculty of Infor-X, Xidian University（西安电子科技大学Infor-X学院）；College of Artificial Intelligence, Inner Mongolia Normal University（内蒙古师范大学人工智能学院）
Compressed Proximal Federated Learning for Non-Convex Composite Optimization on Heterogeneous Data
School of Intelligent Systems Engineering, Sun Yat-Sen University（中山大学智能系统工程学院）；Department of Automation, Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology, Tsinghua University（清华大学自动化系）；Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Victoria（维多利亚大学机械工程系）
George Mason University（乔治梅森大学）；IBM Research - Almaden（IBM阿尔马登研究院）；Emory University（埃默里大学）
Federated learning (FL) involves training a model over massive distributed devices, while keeping the training data localized. This form of collaborative learning exposes new tradeoffs among model convergence speed, model accuracy, balance across clients, and communication cost, with new challenges including: (1) straggler problem, where the clients lag due to data or (computing and network) resource heterogeneity, and (2) communication bottleneck, where a large number of clients communicate their local updates to a central server and bottleneck the server. Many existing FL methods focus on op…
Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL)（三菱电机研究实验室）；Information Technology R&D Center, Mitsubishi Electric Corporation（三菱电机株式会社信息技术研发中心）；NC State University（北卡罗来纳州立大学）
While privacy concerns entice connected and automated vehicles to incorporate on-board federated learning (FL) solutions, an integrated vehicle-to-everything communication with heterogeneous computation power aware learning platform is urgently necessary to make it a reality. Motivated by this, we propose a novel mobility, communication and computation aware online FL platform that uses on-road vehicles as learning agents. Thanks to the advanced features of modern vehicles, the on-board sensors can collect data as vehicles travel along their trajectories, while the on-board processors can trai…
King Abdullah University of Science and Technology（阿卜杜拉国王科技大学）；Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology（莫斯科物理技术学院）
Inspired by recent work of Islamov et al (2021), we propose a family of Federated Newton Learn (FedNL) methods, which we believe is a marked step in the direction of making second-order methods applicable to FL. In contrast to the aforementioned work, FedNL employs a different Hessian learning technique which i) enhances privacy as it does not rely on the training data to be revealed to the coordinating server, ii) makes it applicable beyond generalized linear models, and iii) provably works with general contractive compression operators for compressing the local Hessians, such as Top-$K$ or R…
Shenzhen University（深圳大学）；Macquarie University（麦考瑞大学）；Georgia State University（佐治亚州立大学）
Federated Learning (FL) is an emerging decentralized learning framework through which multiple clients can collaboratively train a learning model. However, a major obstacle that impedes the wide deployment of FL lies in massive communication traffic. To train high dimensional machine learning models (such as CNN models), heavy communication traffic can be incurred by exchanging model updates via the Internet between clients and the parameter server (PS), implying that the network resource can be easily exhausted. Compressing model updates is an effective way to reduce the traffic amount. Howev…
CSI-GPT: Integrating Generative Pre-Trained Transformer with Federated-Tuning to Acquire Downlink Massive MIMO Channels
School of Information and Electronics, Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学信息与电子学院）；King Abdulaziz University（阿卜杜勒阿齐兹国王大学）；School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton（南安普顿大学电子与计算机科学学院）；Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI)（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）
Centre for Wireless Communications (CWC), University of Oulu（奥卢大学无线通信中心（CWC））；Princeton University（普林斯顿大学）
In this article, we study the problem of robust reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided downlink communication over heterogeneous RIS types in the supervised learning setting. By modeling downlink communication over heterogeneous RIS designs as different workers that learn how to optimize phase configurations in a distributed manner, we solve this distributed learning problem using a distributionally robust formulation in a communication-efficient manner, while establishing its rate of convergence. By doing so, we ensure that the global model performance of the worst-case worker is clos…
Does Federated Learning (FL) work when both uplink and downlink communications have errors? How much communication noise can FL handle and what is its impact to the learning performance? This work is devoted to answering these practically important questions by explicitly incorporating both uplink and downlink noisy channels in the FL pipeline. We present several novel convergence analyses of FL over simultaneous uplink and downlink noisy communication channels, which encompass full and partial clients participation, direct model and model differential transmissions, and non-independent and id…
DG-FedReuse: Proxy-Gradient-Gated Cached-Update Reuse with Matched Sparse Uplink Accounting
Jamia Hamdard（贾米亚·哈姆达德大学）；Homi Bhabha National Institute（霍米·巴伯国家研究所）；Variable Energy Cyclotron Centre（可变能量回旋加速器中心）；Gargi Memorial Institute of Technology（加尔吉纪念技术学院）；Maulana Abul Kalam Azad University of Technology（毛拉纳·阿布尔·卡拉姆·阿扎德技术大学）
School of Science and Engineering, the Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen)（香港中文大学（深圳）理工学院）；Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Imperial College London（伦敦帝国理工学院电气与电子工程系）
We consider federated edge learning (FEEL) over wireless fading channels taking into account the downlink and uplink channel latencies, and the random computation delays at the clients. We speed up the training process by overlapping the communication with computation. With fountain coded transmission of the global model update, clients receive the global model asynchronously, and start performing local computations right away. Then, we propose a dynamic client scheduling policy, called MRTP, for uploading local model updates to the parameter server (PS), which, at any time, schedules the clie…
Seoul National University（首尔大学）；University of Oulu（奥卢大学）；Deakin University（迪肯大学）；Yonsei University（延世大学）
Distributed learning frameworks often rely on exchanging model parameters across workers, instead of revealing their raw data. A prime example is federated learning that exchanges the gradients or weights of each neural network model. Under limited communication resources, however, such a method becomes extremely costly particularly for modern deep neural networks having a huge number of model parameters. In this regard, federated distillation (FD) is a compelling distributed learning solution that only exchanges the model outputs whose dimensions are commonly much smaller than the model sizes…
