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Federated learning is a new learning paradigm that decouples data collection and model training via multi-party computation and model aggregation. As a flexible learning setting, federated learning has the potential to integrate with other learning frameworks. We conduct a focused survey of federated learning in conjunction with other learning algorithms. Specifically, we explore various learning algorithms to improve the vanilla federated averaging algorithm and review model fusion methods such as adaptive aggregation, regularization, clustered methods, and Bayesian methods. Following the emerging trends, we also discuss federated learning in the intersection with other learning paradigms, termed as federated x learning, where x includes multitask learning, meta-learning, transfer learning, unsupervised learning, and reinforcement learning. This survey reviews the state of the art, challenges, and future directions.
Personalization methods in federated learning aim to balance the benefits of federated and local training for data availability, communication cost, and robustness to client heterogeneity. Approaches that require clients to communicate all model parameters can be undesirable due to privacy and communication constraints. Other approaches require always-available or stateful clients, impractical in large-scale cross-device settings. We introduce Federated Reconstruction, the first model-agnostic framework for partially local federated learning suitable for training and inference at scale. We motivate the framework via a connection to model-agnostic meta learning, empirically demonstrate its performance over existing approaches for collaborative filtering and next word prediction, and release an open-source library for evaluating approaches in this setting. We also describe the successful deployment of this approach at scale for federated collaborative filtering in a mobile keyboard application.
Federated learning (FL) is a privacy-preserving machine learning paradigm that enables collaborative training among geographically distributed and heterogeneous users without gathering their data. Extending FL beyond the conventional supervised learning paradigm, federated Reinforcement Learning (RL) was proposed to handle sequential decision-making problems for various privacy-sensitive applications such as autonomous driving. However, the existing federated RL algorithms directly combine model-free RL with FL, and thus generally have high sample complexity and lack theoretical guarantees. To address the above challenges, we propose a new federated RL algorithm that incorporates model-based RL and ensemble knowledge distillation into FL. Specifically, we utilise FL and knowledge distillation to create an ensemble of dynamics models from clients, and then train the policy by solely using the ensemble model without interacting with the real environment. Furthermore, we theoretically prove that the monotonic improvement of the proposed algorithm is guaranteed. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm obtains significantly higher sample efficiency compared to federated model-free RL algorithms in the challenging continuous control benchmark environments. The results also show the impact of non-IID client data and local update steps on the performance of federated RL, validating the insights obtained from our theoretical analysis.
Present-day federated learning (FL) systems deployed over edge networks have to consistently deal with a large number of workers with high degrees of heterogeneity in data and/or computing capabilities. This diverse set of workers necessitates the development of FL algorithms that allow: (1) flexible worker participation that grants the workers capability to engage in training at will, (2) varying number of local updates (based on computational resources) at each worker along with asynchronous communication with the server, and (3) heterogeneous data across workers. To address these challenges, in this work, we propose a new paradigm in FL called ``Anarchic Federated Learning (AFL). In stark contrast to conventional FL models, each worker in AFL has complete freedom to choose i) when to participate in FL, and ii) the number of local steps to perform in each round based on its current situation (e.g., battery level, communication channels, privacy concerns). However, AFL also introduces significant challenges in algorithmic design because the server needs to handle the chaotic worker behaviors. Toward this end, we propose two Anarchic FedAvg-like algorithms with two-sided learning rates for both cross-device and cross-silo settings, which are named AFedAvg-TSLR-CD and AFedAvg-TSLR-CS, respectively. For general worker information arrival processes, we show that both algorithms retain the highly desirable linear speedup effect in the new AFL paradigm. Moreover, we show that our AFedAvg-TSLR algorithmic framework can be viewed as a {em meta-algorithm} for AFL in the sense that they can utilize advanced FL algorithms as worker- and/or server-side optimizers to achieve enhanced performance under AFL. We validate the proposed algorithms with extensive experiments on real-world datasets.
In current deep learning paradigms, local training or the Standalone framework tends to result in overfitting and thus poor generalizability. This problem can be addressed by Distributed or Federated Learning (FL) that leverages a parameter server to aggregate model updates from individual participants. However, most existing Distributed or FL frameworks have overlooked an important aspect of participation: collaborative fairness. In particular, all participants can receive the same or similar models, regardless of their contributions. To address this issue, we investigate the collaborative fairness in FL, and propose a novel Collaborative Fair Federated Learning (CFFL) framework which utilizes reputation to enforce participants to converge to different models, thus achieving fairness without compromising the predictive performance. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that CFFL achieves high fairness, delivers comparable accuracy to the Distributed framework, and outperforms the Standalone framework.
Federated learning is a distributed machine learning paradigm where multiple data owners (clients) collaboratively train one machine learning model while keeping data on their own devices. The heterogeneity of client datasets is one of the most important challenges of federated learning algorithms. Studies have found performance reduction with standard federated algorithms, such as FedAvg, on non-IID data. Many existing works on handling non-IID data adopt the same aggregation framework as FedAvg and focus on improving model updates either on the server side or on clients. In this work, we tackle this challenge in a different view by introducing redistribution rounds that delay the aggregation. We perform experiments on multiple tasks and show that the proposed framework significantly improves the performance on non-IID data.