FLAIR: Distributed Federated Learning with Dynamic Clustering

AI-Driven Federated Learning Optimization for Privacy-Preserving Big Data Environments

The fast growth of big data, along with the growing stricter privacy laws, poses tremendous challenges to the traditional centralized implementation of AI models. Federated Learning (FL) offers a decentralized solution; however, it is undermined by a number of performance limitations such as large communicational overhead, statistical heterogeneity due to nonindependent and identically distributed data, and small computational capability of edge clients. This paper presents an optimized AI-based FL architecture, which consolidates a client selection algorithm (that is based on reinforcement-learning) and a dynamic and fairness-conscious aggregation protocol, as well as a new query-fragment caching solution. The combined model is strategically focusing on high utility players, reducing skew in data during model aggregation, and lessening on-device unnecessary processing. The empirical analysis of CIFAR-10 and FEMNIST shows that the presented framework reduces the communication rounds by 38% and the model accuracy is increased by 5.7% when compared with Fed Avg and Fed Prox, at the same time, data privacy is also rigorously maintained.

DASFL: Dynamic Adaptive Split Federated Learning for Heterogeneous Clients

A review of federated learning: architectures, challenges, and targeted solutions

A review of federated learning through a structured taxonomy that covers its core architectural paradigms, major learning types, model training approaches, and aggregation mechanisms, and analyzes the principal challenges confronting FL, including privacy and security risks, statistical and system heterogeneity, communication constraints, and global model divergence.

Federated Learning with Differential Privacy: A Comprehensive Framework for Privacy-Preserving Distributed Machine Learning

Overview: Federated Learning (FL) is a type of machine learning in which multiple clients use their own data to train a model. This does not require sending the raw data from each client to a central server. However, FL is currently very vulnerable to several types of attacks, including inference, model inversion, and membership inference. In this study, we have implemented a comprehensive experimental framework for analysing FL performance using standard FL aggregation protocols FedAvg, FedProx, and SCAFFOLD in conjunction with Differential Privacy (DP) mechanisms; specifically, the Gaussian noise mechanism with Rényi Differential Privacy (RDP) accountants. Our experiments all used K = 100 simulated clients, with heterogeneous data distribution across the entire federation (non-IID), and the respective clean datasets used were MNIST and CIFAR-10. For example, in our IID scenarios, our DP-FedAvg protocol achieved an accuracy of 84.9% on MNIST with ε = 1.0 and δ = 10^-5 (i.e., no privacy guarantees and 92.6% reuse of the same parameters). This corresponds to a 7.7-percentage-point trade-off in accuracy for provable privacy. In our non-IID scenario, we achieved an accuracy of 72.8% for the exact same privacy parameters and an LDA αᴸᴸᴸ = 0.5. We systematically analyse how various combinations of clipping norms on gradients, noise multipliers, and client participation rates converged. All results have been reported as-is, along with the associated standard deviation across each of the five independent sample runs that we performed using different random seed values. Finally, our framework will assist practitioners deploying privacy-friendly FL within either healthcare, banking, or Internet of Things environments.

Adaptive Toggling of Architectural Patterns for Federated Learning

Federated Learning (FL) is increasingly adopted as an alternative to centralized Machine Learning (ML) techniques, as it allows clients to preserve the privacy of their data. However, FL systems pose new challenges in terms of adaptation, as design choices are conditioned by client characteristics and network conditions, thus necessitating adaptive strategies that elaborate on such a different operational environment. Previous work introduces a set of architectural patterns to support practitioners at design time, but their effectiveness has only been investigated when statically activated throughout the FL process. This work presents a novel FL framework, namely FLiP , where a subset of the aforementioned patterns are dynamically and adaptively toggled in response to evolving performance metrics and boundary conditions. We empirically evaluate FLiP across multiple federation configurations and two learning tasks, considering both static and dynamic conditions. Results indicate that dynamically toggling architectural patterns can be beneficial under specific conditions, with cases leading to an improvement of up to \(10\%\) in learning accuracy, at the cost of negligible overhead at deployment time.

FL-OA: A Byzantine-Robust Federated Learning Framework with Outsourced Auditing for Intelligent Devices

Federated learning (FL) enables multiple intelligent devices to collaboratively train a high-accuracy model without sharing raw data. However, due to its distributed nature, FL is vulnerable to Byzantine attacks. Existing defense methods rely on strong assumptions, such as the proportion of malicious devices not exceeding 50\%, or the server having an additional root dataset that matches the training task. Moreover, they show limited efficacy as they overlook $(i)$ the divergence among benign updates and $(ii)$ the curse of dimensionality involved in comparing two high-dimensional updates. To solve these concerns, we propose FL-OA, a Byzantine-robust federated learning framework utilizing outsourced auditing. In FL-OA, the server collaborates with third-party organization that holds an additional root dataset to perform outsourced auditing, thereby enabling the server to achieve robust aggregation without strong assumptions. Additionally, FL-OA introduces a gradient ascent step and a correction term during local training to mitigate the divergence among benign updates, and designs a parameter importance indicator to extract critical parameters for auditing, alleviating the curse of dimensionality. We further provide a detailed theoretical analysis of FL-OA. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FL-OA outperforms existing defense methods against Byzantine attacks.