The privacy-sensitive nature of decentralized datasets and the robustness of eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) on tabular data raise the needs to train XGBoost in the context of federated learning (FL). Existing works on federated XGBoost in the horizontal setting rely on the sharing of gradients, which induce per-node level communication frequency and serious privacy concerns. To alleviate these problems, we develop an innovative framework for horizontal federated XGBoost which does not depend on the sharing of gradients and simultaneously boosts privacy and communication efficiency by making the learning rates of the aggregated tree ensembles learnable. We conduct extensive evaluations on various classification and regression datasets, showing our approach achieves performance comparable to the state-of-the-art method and effectively improves communication efficiency by lowering both communication rounds and communication overhead by factors ranging from 25x to 700x. Project Page: https://flower.ai/blog/2023-04-19-xgboost-with-flower/
Yale University（耶鲁大学）；Renmin University of China（中国人民大学）；JD Technology Group（京东科技集团）
Federated learning, conducive to solving data privacy and security problems, has attracted increasing attention recently. However, the existing federated boosting model sequentially builds a decision tree model with the weak base learner, resulting in redundant boosting steps and high interactive communication costs. In contrast, the federated bagging model saves time by building multi-decision trees in parallel, but it suffers from performance loss. With the aim of obtaining an outstanding performance with less time cost, we propose a novel model in a vertically federated setting termed as Fe…
University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）；Yale（耶鲁大学）
In this paper, we initiate a study of functional minimization in Federated Learning. First, in the semi-heterogeneous setting, when the marginal distributions of the feature vectors on client machines are identical, we develop the federated functional gradient boosting (FFGB) method that provably converges to the global minimum. Subsequently, we extend our results to the fully-heterogeneous setting (where marginal distributions of feature vectors may differ) by designing an efficient variant of FFGB called FFGB.C, with provable convergence to a neighborhood of the global minimum within a radiu…
Enhancing One-Shot Federated Learning Through Data and Ensemble Co-Boosting
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Hong Kong Baptist University（香港浸会大学）；University of Maryland College Park（马里兰大学学院公园分校）；The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；The University of Western Australia（西澳大利亚大学）
Gradient Boosting Decision Trees (GBDTs) have become very successful in recent years, with many awards in machine learning and data mining competitions. There have been several recent studies on how to train GBDTs in the federated learning setting. In this paper, we focus on horizontal federated learning, where data samples with the same features are distributed among multiple parties. However, existing studies are not efficient or effective enough for practical use. They suffer either from the inefficiency due to the usage of costly data transformations such as secret sharing and homomorphic …
Little is Enough: Boosting Privacy by Sharing Only Hard Labels in Federated Semi-Supervised Learning
Institute for Neuroinformatics, Ruhr University Bochum（波鸿鲁尔大学神经信息学研究所）；Monash University（莫纳什大学）；Case Western Reserve University（凯斯西储大学）；Carenostics（Carenostics公司）
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）；University of Connecticut（康涅狄格大学）
Vertical Federated Learning (FL) is a new paradigm that enables users with non-overlapping attributes of the same data samples to jointly train a model without directly sharing the raw data. Nevertheless, recent works show that it's still not sufficient to prevent privacy leakage from the training process or the trained model. This paper focuses on studying the privacy-preserving tree boosting algorithms under the vertical FL. The existing solutions based on cryptography involve heavy computation and communication overhead and are vulnerable to inference attacks. Although the solution based on…
Boosting the Performance of Decentralized Federated Learning via Catalyst Acceleration
College of Systems Engineering, National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学系统工程学院）；School of Cyber Science and Technology, Shenzhen Campus of Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学深圳校区网络空间科学与技术学院）
An Efficiency-boosting Client Selection Scheme for Federated Learning with Fairness Guarantee
South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；the University of Warwick（华威大学）；State University of New York, New Paltz（纽约州立大学新帕尔兹分校）；The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）
University of California, Los Angeles（加州大学洛杉矶分校）；Webank（微众银行）；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
The protection of user privacy is an important concern in machine learning, as evidenced by the rolling out of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union (EU) in May 2018. The GDPR is designed to give users more control over their personal data, which motivates us to explore machine learning frameworks for data sharing that do not violate user privacy. To meet this goal, in this paper, we propose a novel lossless privacy-preserving tree-boosting system known as SecureBoost in the setting of federated learning. SecureBoost first conducts entity alignment under a privacy…
BoBa: Boosting Backdoor Detection through Data Distribution Inference in Federated Learning
University of South Florida（南佛罗里达大学）；University of Massachusetts, Lowell（马萨诸塞大学洛厄尔分校）；Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University（弗吉尼亚理工学院暨州立大学）；University of Kentucky（肯塔基大学）
Boosting multi-demographic federated learning for chest radiograph analysis using general-purpose self-supervised representations
University Hospital RWTH Aachen（亚琛工业大学附属医院）；Hamedan University of Technology（哈马丹理工大学）；Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg（埃尔朗根-纽伦堡大学）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）
Australian Artificial Intelligence Institute (AAII)（澳大利亚人工智能研究所（AAII））
Open banking enables individual customers to own their banking data, which provides fundamental support for the boosting of a new ecosystem of data marketplaces and financial services. In the near future, it is foreseeable to have decentralized data ownership in the finance sector using federated learning. This is a just-in-time technology that can learn intelligent models in a decentralized training manner. The most attractive aspect of federated learning is its ability to decompose model training into a centralized server and distributed nodes without collecting private data. This kind of de…
We address the relatively unexplored problem of hyper-parameter optimization (HPO) for federated learning (FL-HPO). We introduce Federated Loss suRface Aggregation (FLoRA), the first FL-HPO solution framework that can address use cases of tabular data and gradient boosting training algorithms in addition to stochastic gradient descent/neural networks commonly addressed in the FL literature. The framework enables single-shot FL-HPO, by first identifying a good set of hyper-parameters that are used in a **single** FL training. Thus, it enables FL-HPO solutions with minimal additional communicati…
Federated Learning (FL) is an approach to collaboratively train a model across multiple parties without sharing data between parties or an aggregator. It is used both in the consumer domain to protect personal data as well as in enterprise settings, where dealing with data domicile regulation and the pragmatics of data silos are the main drivers. While gradient boosted tree implementations such as XGBoost have been very successful for many use cases, its federated learning adaptations tend to be very slow due to using cryptographic and privacy methods and have not experienced widespread use. W…
Learnable Sparse Customization in Heterogeneous Edge Computing
Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Institute for Network Sciences and Cyberspace, Tsinghua University（清华大学网络科学与网络空间研究院）；School of Computer Science and Engineering, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学计算机科学与工程学院）；Zhongguancun Laboratory（中关村实验室）
For high-dimensional data, there are huge communication costs for distributed GBDT because the communication volume of GBDT is related to the number of features. To overcome this problem, we propose a novel gradient boosting algorithm, the Gradient Boosting Untrained Neural Network(GBUN). GBUN ensembles the untrained randomly generated neural network that softly distributes data samples to multiple neuron outputs and dramatically reduces the communication costs for distributed learning. To avoid creating huge neural networks for high-dimensional data, we extend Simhash algorithm to mimic forwa…
Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology（蔚山科学技术院）；Kakao Enterprise（Kakao企业）
Due to the curse of statistical heterogeneity across clients, adopting a personalized federated learning method has become an essential choice for the successful deployment of federated learning-based services. Among diverse branches of personalization techniques, a model mixture-based personalization method is preferred as each client has their own personalized model as a result of federated learning. It usually requires a local model and a federated model, but this approach is either limited to partial parameter exchange or requires additional local updates, each of which is helpless to nove…
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Bytedance Inc.（字节跳动公司）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）
Federated learning is the distributed machine learning framework that enables collaborative training across multiple parties while ensuring data privacy. Practical adaptation of XGBoost, the state-of-the-art tree boosting framework, to federated learning remains limited due to high cost incurred by conventional privacy-preserving methods. To address the problem, we propose two variants of federated XGBoost with privacy guarantee: FedXGBoost-SMM and FedXGBoost-LDP. Our first protocol FedXGBoost-SMM deploys enhanced secure matrix multiplication method to preserve privacy with lossless accuracy a…
We address the relatively unexplored problem of hyper-parameter optimization (HPO) for federated learning (FL-HPO). We introduce Federated Loss SuRface Aggregation (FLoRA), a general FL-HPO solution framework that can address use cases of tabular data and any Machine Learning (ML) model including gradient boosting training algorithms and therefore further expands the scope of FL-HPO. FLoRA enables single-shot FL-HPO: identifying a single set of good hyper-parameters that are subsequently used in a single FL training. Thus, it enables FL-HPO solutions with minimal additional communication overh…
Autonomous driving is an active research topic in both academia and industry. However, most of the existing solutions focus on improving the accuracy by training learnable models with centralized large-scale data. Therefore, these methods do not take into account the user's privacy. In this paper, we present a new approach to learn autonomous driving policy while respecting privacy concerns. We propose a peer-to-peer Deep Federated Learning (DFL) approach to train deep architectures in a fully decentralized manner and remove the need for central orchestration. We design a new Federated Autonom…
Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
Recently, federated learning has emerged as a promising approach for training a global model using data from multiple organizations without leaking their raw data. Nevertheless, directly applying federated learning to real-world tasks faces two challenges: (1) heterogeneity in the data among different organizations; and (2) data noises inside individual organizations. In this paper, we propose a general framework to solve the above two challenges simultaneously. Specifically, we propose using distributionally robust optimization to mitigate the negative effects caused by data heterogeneity par…
National Institute of Technology Kurukshetra（国立库鲁克舍特拉理工学院）
In recent times, federated machine learning has been very useful in building intelligent intrusion detection systems for IoT devices. As IoT devices are equipped with a security architecture vulnerable to various attacks, these security loopholes may bring a risk during federated training of decentralized IoT devices. Adversaries can take control over these IoT devices and inject false gradients to degrade the global model performance. In this paper, we have proposed an approach that detects the adversaries with the help of a clustering algorithm. After clustering, it further rewards the clien…
Privacy-preserving machine learning has drawn increasingly attention recently, especially with kinds of privacy regulations come into force. Under such situation, Federated Learning (FL) appears to facilitate privacy-preserving joint modeling among multiple parties. Although many federated algorithms have been extensively studied, there is still a lack of secure and practical gradient tree boosting models (e.g., XGB) in literature. In this paper, we aim to build large-scale secure XGB under vertically federated learning setting. We guarantee data privacy from three aspects. Specifically, (i) w…
FQPDR: Federated Quantum Neural Network for Privacy-preserving Early Detection of Diabetic Retinopathy
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad University of Technology, West Bengal（计算机科学与工程系，穆拉纳·阿布·卡尔·拉马纳特技术大学，西孟加拉邦）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering, MCKV Institute of Engineering, West Bengal（计算机科学与工程系，MCKV工程学院，西孟加拉邦）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering, OmDayal Group of Institutions, West Bengal（计算机科学与工程系，OmDayal学院集团，西孟加拉邦）
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…
Princeton University（普林斯顿大学）；I.B.M T.J. Watson Research Center（IBM托马斯·J·沃森研究中心）
Federated learning distributes model training among a multitude of agents, who, guided by privacy concerns, perform training using their local data but share only model parameter updates, for iterative aggregation at the server. In this work, we explore the threat of model poisoning attacks on federated learning initiated by a single, non-colluding malicious agent where the adversarial objective is to cause the model to misclassify a set of chosen inputs with high confidence. We explore a number of strategies to carry out this attack, starting with simple boosting of the malicious agent's upda…
