Federated Learning Systems: Architecture Alternatives

O. A. Wahab A. Mourad T. Taleb + 1 lainnya

10 Februari 2021

The communication and networking field is hungry for machine learning decision-making solutions to replace the traditional model-driven approaches that proved to be not rich enough for seizing the ever-growing complexity and heterogeneity of the modern systems in the field. Traditional machine learning solutions assume the existence of (cloud-based) central entities that are in charge of processing the data. Nonetheless, the difficulty of accessing private data, together with the high cost of transmitting raw data to the central entity gave rise to a decentralized machine learning approach called Federated Learning. The main idea of federated learning is to perform an on-device collaborative training of a single machine learning model without having to share the raw training data with any third-party entity. Although few survey articles on federated learning already exist in the literature, the motivation of this survey stems from three essential observations. The first one is the lack of a fine-grained multi-level classification of the federated learning literature, where the existing surveys base their classification on only one criterion or aspect. The second observation is that the existing surveys focus only on some common challenges, but disregard other essential aspects such as reliable client selection, resource management and training service pricing. The third observation is the lack of explicit and straightforward directives for researchers to help them design future federated learning solutions that overcome the state-of-the-art research gaps. To address these points, we first provide a comprehensive tutorial on federated learning and its associated concepts, technologies and learning approaches. We then survey and highlight the applications and future directions of federated learning in the domain of communication and networking. Thereafter, we design a three-level classification scheme that first categorizes the federated learning literature based on the high-level challenge that they tackle. Then, we classify each high-level challenge into a set of specific low-level challenges to foster a better understanding of the topic. Finally, we provide, within each low-level challenge, a fine-grained classification based on the technique used to address this particular challenge. For each category of high-level challenges, we provide a set of desirable criteria and future research directions that are aimed to help the research community design innovative and efficient future solutions. To the best of our knowledge, our survey is the most comprehensive in terms of challenges and techniques it covers and the most fine-grained in terms of the multi-level classification scheme it presents.

Q. Lu Liming Zhu Hye-young Paik + 1 lainnya

22 Juni 2021

Federated learning is an emerging machine learning paradigm that enables multiple devices to train models locally and formulate a global model, without sharing the clients' local data. A federated learning system can be viewed as a large-scale distributed system, involving different components and stakeholders with diverse requirements and constraints. Hence, developing a federated learning system requires both software system design thinking and machine learning knowledge. Although much effort has been put into federated learning from the machine learning perspectives, our previous systematic literature review on the area shows that there is a distinct lack of considerations for software architecture design for federated learning. In this paper, we propose FLRA, a reference architecture for federated learning systems, which provides a template design for federated learning-based solutions. The proposed FLRA reference architecture is based on an extensive review of existing patterns of federated learning systems found in the literature and existing industrial implementation. The FLRA reference architecture consists of a pool of architectural patterns that could address the frequently recurring design problems in federated learning architectures. The FLRA reference architecture can serve as a design guideline to assist architects and developers with practical solutions for their problems, which can be further customised.

R. Raskar Praneeth Vepakomma Yan Kang + 13 lainnya

27 Juli 2020

Federated learning is a rapidly growing research field in the machine learning domain. Although considerable research efforts have been made, existing libraries cannot adequately support diverse algorithmic development (e.g., diverse topology and flexible message exchange), and inconsistent dataset and model usage in experiments make fair comparisons difficult. In this work, we introduce FedML, an open research library and benchmark that facilitates the development of new federated learning algorithms and fair performance comparisons. FedML supports three computing paradigms (distributed training, mobile on-device training, and standalone simulation) for users to conduct experiments in different system environments. FedML also promotes diverse algorithmic research with flexible and generic API design and reference baseline implementations. A curated and comprehensive benchmark dataset for the non-I.I.D setting aims at making a fair comparison. We believe FedML can provide an efficient and reproducible means of developing and evaluating algorithms for the federated learning research community. We maintain the source code, documents, and user community at this https URL.

Q. Li Yuan Li Bingsheng He + 3 lainnya

14 Juni 2020

This article presents and characterizes an Open Application Repository for Federated Learning (OARF), a benchmark suite for federated machine learning systems. Previously available benchmarks for federated learning (FL) have focused mainly on synthetic datasets and use a limited number of applications. OARF mimics more realistic application scenarios with publicly available datasets as different data silos in image, text, and structured data. Our characterization shows that the benchmark suite is diverse in data size, distribution, feature distribution, and learning task complexity. The extensive evaluations with reference implementations show the future research opportunities for important aspects of FL systems. We have developed reference implementations, and evaluated the important aspects of FL, including model accuracy, communication cost, throughput, and convergence time. Through these evaluations, we discovered some interesting findings such as FL can effectively increase end-to-end throughput. The code of OARF is publicly available on GitHub.1

Yunming Liao Zhenguo Ma Lun Wang + 3 lainnya

1 Oktober 2023

Data generated at the network edge can be processed locally by leveraging the paradigm of Edge Computing (EC). Aided by EC, Federated Learning (FL) has been becoming a practical and popular approach for distributed machine learning over locally distributed data. However, FL faces three critical challenges, i.e., resource constraint, system heterogeneity and context dynamics in EC. To address these challenges, we present a training-efficient FL method, termed FedLamp, by optimizing both the Local updating frequency and model compression ratio in the resource-constrained EC systems. We theoretically analyze the model convergence rate and obtain a convergence upper bound related to the local updating frequency and model compression ratio. Upon the convergence bound, we propose a control algorithm, that adaptively determines diverse and appropriate local updating frequencies and model compression ratios for different edge nodes, so as to reduce the waiting time and enhance the training efficiency. We evaluate the performance of FedLamp through extensive simulation and testbed experiments. Evaluation results show that FedLamp can reduce the traffic consumption by 63% and the completion time by about 52% for achieving the similar test accuracy, compared to the baselines.