Federated Foundation Models over Vehicular Networks

This paper presents a forward-looking vision for integrating the emerging multi-modal multi-task federated foundation models (M3T FedFMs) into vehicular networks, with the goal of unifying the expressive power of multi-modal multi-task foundation models (M3T FMs) with the privacy-preserving and distributed learning capabilities of federated learning (FL). Given the largely underexplored nature of this research direction, we first introduce the fundamental training/fine-tuning principles of M3T FedFMs. We then discuss a range of their representative use cases in vehicular networks, illustrating the significant potential of M3T FedFMs to enable next-generation vehicular intelligence. Afterwards, we identify key constraints inherent to vehicular environments that challenge the practical deployment of M3T FedFMs, and articulate a set of forward-looking research directions to address these challenges. Furthermore, through a case study conducted on a real-world vehicular dataset (i.e., Waymo Open Dataset), we demonstrate the promise of M3T FedFMs for vehicular networks and release our implementation to facilitate reproducibility and stimulate research in this emerging area (repository: https://github.com/KasraBorazjani/vehicular-fedfm)

From Federated Learning to $\mathbb{X}$-Learning: Breaking the Barriers of Decentrality Through Random Walks

We provide our perspective on $\mathbb{X}$-Learning ($\mathbb{X}$L), a novel distributed learning architecture that generalizes and extends the concept of decentralization. Our goal is to present a vision for $\mathbb{X}$L, introducing its unexplored design considerations and degrees of freedom. To this end, we shed light on the intuitive yet non-trivial connections between $\mathbb{X}$L, graph theory, and Markov chains. We also present a series of open research directions to stimulate further research.