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Federated learning (also known as collaborative learning) is a machine learning technique that trains an algorithm via multiple independent sessions, each using its own dataset. This approach stands in contrast to traditional centralized machine learning techniques where local datasets are merged into one training session, as well as to approaches that assume that local data samples are identically distributed. Federated learning enables multiple actors to build a common, robust machine learning model without sharing data, thus addressing critical issues such as data privacy, data security, data access rights and access to heterogeneous data. Its applications engage industries including defense, telecommunications, Internet of Things, and pharmaceuticals. A major open question is when/whether federated learning is preferable to pooled data learning. Another open question concerns the trustworthiness of the devices and the impact of malicious actors on the learned model. Federated learning aims at training a machine learning algorithm, for instance deep neural networks, on multiple local datasets contained in local nodes without explicitly exchanging data samples. The general principle consists in training local models on local data samples and exchanging parameters (e.g. the weights and biases of a deep neural network) between these local nodes at some frequency to generate a global model shared by all nodes. The main difference between federated learning and distributed learning lies in the assumptions made on the properties of the local datasets, as distributed learning originally aims at parallelizing computing power where federated learning originally aims at training on heterogeneous datasets. While distributed learning also aims at training a single model on multiple servers, a common underlying assumption is that the local datasets are independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) and roughly have the same size. None of these hypotheses are made for federated learning; instead, the datasets are typically heterogeneous and their sizes may span several orders of magnitude.

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Related publications (1)

Dynamic Probabilistic Pruning: A General Framework for Hardware-Constrained Pruning at Different Granularities

Alexandre Schmid, Lizeth Gonzalez Carabarin

Unstructured neural network pruning algorithms have achieved impressive compression ratios. However, the resulting-typically irregular-sparse matrices hamper efficient hardware implementations, leading to additional memory usage and complex control logic that diminishes the benefits of unstructured pruning. This has spurred structured coarse-grained pruning solutions that prune entire feature maps or even layers, enabling efficient implementation at the expense of reduced flexibility. Here, we propose a flexible new pruning mechanism that facilitates pruning at different granularities (weights, kernels, and feature maps) while retaining efficient memory organization (e.g., pruning exactly k-out-of- n weights for every output neuron or pruning exactly k-out-of-n kernels for every feature map). We refer to this algorithm as dynamic probabilistic pruning (DPP). DPP leverages the Gumbel-softmax relaxation for differentiable k-out-of-n sampling, facilitating end-to-end optimization. We show that DPP achieves competitive compression ratios and classification accuracy when pruning common deep learning models trained on different benchmark datasets for image classification. Relevantly, the dynamic masking of DPP facilitates for joint optimization of pruning and weight quantization in order to even further compress the network, which we show as well. Finally, we propose novel information-theoretic metrics that show the confidence and pruning diversity of pruning masks within a layer.

IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC2022