No Arabic abstract
Federated learning (FL) has attracted increasing attention as a promising approach to driving a vast number of end devices with artificial intelligence. However, it is very challenging to guarantee the efficiency of FL considering the unreliable nature of end devices while the cost of device-server communication cannot be neglected. In this paper, we propose SAFA, a semi-asynchronous FL protocol, to address the problems in federated learning such as low round efficiency and poor convergence rate in extreme conditions (e.g., clients dropping offline frequently). We introduce novel designs in the steps of model distribution, client selection and global aggregation to mitigate the impacts of stragglers, crashes and model staleness in order to boost efficiency and improve the quality of the global model. We have conducted extensive experiments with typical machine learning tasks. The results demonstrate that the proposed protocol is effective in terms of shortening federated round duration, reducing local resource wastage, and improving the accuracy of the global model at an acceptable communication cost.
Federated learning (FL) is experiencing a fast booming with the wave of distributed machine learning and ever-increasing privacy concerns. In the FL paradigm, global model aggregation is handled by a centralized aggregate server based on local updated gradients trained on local nodes, which mitigates privacy leakage caused by the collection of sensitive information. With the increased computing and communicating capabilities of edge and IoT devices, applying FL on heterogeneous devices to train machine learning models becomes a trend. The synchronous aggregation strategy in the classic FL paradigm cannot effectively use the resources, especially on heterogeneous devices, due to its waiting for straggler devices before aggregation in each training round. Furthermore, in real-world scenarios, the disparity of data dispersed on devices (i.e. data heterogeneity) downgrades the accuracy of models. As a result, many asynchronous FL (AFL) paradigms are presented in various application scenarios to improve efficiency, performance, privacy, and security. This survey comprehensively analyzes and summarizes existing variants of AFL according to a novel classification mechanism, including device heterogeneity, data heterogeneity, privacy and security on heterogeneous devices, and applications on heterogeneous devices. Finally, this survey reveals rising challenges and presents potentially promising research directions in this under-investigated field.
Federated learning (FL) is an emerging distributed machine learning paradigm that protects privacy and tackles the problem of isolated data islands. At present, there are two main communication strategies of FL: synchronous FL and asynchronous FL. The advantages of synchronous FL are that the model has high precision and fast convergence speed. However, this synchronous communication strategy has the risk that the central server waits too long for the devices, namely, the straggler effect which has a negative impact on some time-critical applications. Asynchronous FL has a natural advantage in mitigating the straggler effect, but there are threats of model quality degradation and server crash. Therefore, we combine the advantages of these two strategies to propose a clustered semi-asynchronous federated learning (CSAFL) framework. We evaluate CSAFL based on four imbalanced federated datasets in a non-IID setting and compare CSAFL to the baseline methods. The experimental results show that CSAFL significantly improves test accuracy by more than +5% on the four datasets compared to TA-FedAvg. In particular, CSAFL improves absolute test accuracy by +34.4% on non-IID FEMNIST compared to TA-FedAvg.
In federated learning (FL), model training is distributed over clients and local models are aggregated by a central server. The performance of uploaded models in such situations can vary widely due to imbalanced data distributions, potential demands on privacy protections, and quality of transmissions. In this paper, we aim to minimize FL training delay over wireless channels, constrained by overall training performance as well as each clients differential privacy (DP) requirement. We solve this problem in the framework of multi-agent multi-armed bandit (MAMAB) to deal with the situation where there are multiple clients confornting different unknown transmission environments, e.g., channel fading and interferences. Specifically, we first transform the long-term constraints on both training performance and each clients DP into a virtual queue based on the Lyapunov drift technique. Then, we convert the MAMAB to a max-min bipartite matching problem at each communication round, by estimating rewards with the upper confidence bound (UCB) approach. More importantly, we propose two efficient solutions to this matching problem, i.e., modified Hungarian algorithm and greedy matching with a better alternative (GMBA), in which the first one can achieve the optimal solution with a high complexity while the second one approaches a better trade-off by enabling a verified low-complexity with little performance loss. In addition, we develop an upper bound on the expected regret of this MAMAB based FL framework, which shows a linear growth over the logarithm of communication rounds, justifying its theoretical feasibility. Extensive experimental results are conducted to validate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms, and the impacts of various parameters on the FL performance over wireless edge networks are also discussed.
This study develops a federated learning (FL) framework overcoming largely incremental communication costs due to model sizes in typical frameworks without compromising model performance. To this end, based on the idea of leveraging an unlabeled open dataset, we propose a distillation-based semi-supervised FL (DS-FL) algorithm that exchanges the outputs of local models among mobile devices, instead of model parameter exchange employed by the typical frameworks. In DS-FL, the communication cost depends only on the output dimensions of the models and does not scale up according to the model size. The exchanged model outputs are used to label each sample of the open dataset, which creates an additionally labeled dataset. Based on the new dataset, local models are further trained, and model performance is enhanced owing to the data augmentation effect. We further highlight that in DS-FL, the heterogeneity of the devices dataset leads to ambiguous of each data sample and lowing of the training convergence. To prevent this, we propose entropy reduction averaging, where the aggregated model outputs are intentionally sharpened. Moreover, extensive experiments show that DS-FL reduces communication costs up to 99% relative to those of the FL benchmark while achieving similar or higher classification accuracy.
In this paper we extend the Multidimensional Byzantine Agreement (MBA) Protocol arXiv:2105.13487v2, a leaderless Byzantine agreement for vectors of arbitrary values, into the emph{Cob} protocol, that works in Asynchronous Gossiping (AG) networks. This generalization allows the consensus process to be run by an incomplete network of nodes provided with (non-synchronized) same-speed clocks. Not all nodes are active in every step, so the network size does not hamper the efficiency, as long as the gossiping broadcast delivers the messages to every node in reasonable time. These network assumptions model more closely real-life communication channels, so the Cob protocol may be applicable to a variety of practical problems, such as blockchain platforms implementing sharding. The Cob protocol has the same Bernoulli-like distribution that upper bounds the number of steps required as the MBA protocol, and we prove its correctness and security assuming a supermajority of honest nodes in the network.