Distributed Learning as a Service: The Developer's Perspective

Abstract

Application developers of distributed learning services face challenges that a typical federated learning loop does not address. Specifically, the model updates can still leak private data, devices might not be able to participate in the training due to limited resources, a single aggregator might not be able to scale, and the transmissions of model weights induce a considerable bandwidth cost. This paper demonstrates DLaaS (Distributed Learning as a Service) from the developer's vantage point. Using a single admin dashboard, the developer initiates a distributed/federated learning job and is able to activate Differential Privacy (DP), Split Learning (SL), Hierarchical Aggregation (HA), and Knowledge Distillation (KD) as declarative options, with no change to the clients'code. We demonstrate the complete service lifecycle on an industrial smart-home Wake-up Word (WuW) task, using the"Ok Aura"dataset. Once the developer initiates a distributed learning job by toggling DP, SL, HA, and KD in the admin dashboard, the system dispatches the job to a set of Android clients and Dockerized helper aggregators. In the demonstration, these mechanisms run live across configurations. Then, the clients train the model locally and return their updates. The trained model is served to a consumer-side Android application that performs on-device WuW detection on a live microphone stream. In particular, the conference attendees will be invited to speak the trigger phrase and monitor in real time the per-class confidence and inference latency. Finally, we release the source code and short video walkthroughs of these configurations.