Introducing Federated Learning into Internet of Things ecosystems -- preliminary considerations

Federated learning (FL) was proposed to facilitate the training of models in a distributed environment. It supports the protection of (local) data privacy and uses local resources for model training. Until now, the majority of research has been devoted to "core issues", such as adaptation of machine learning algorithms to FL, data privacy protection, or dealing with the effects of uneven data distribution between clients. This contribution is anchored in a practical use case, where FL is to be actually deployed within an Internet of Things ecosystem. Hence, somewhat different issues that need to be considered, beyond popular considerations found in the literature, are identified. Moreover, an architecture that enables the building of flexible, and adaptable, FL solutions is introduced.

Using adversarial images to improve outcomes of federated learning for non-IID data

One of the important problems in federated learning is how to deal with unbalanced data. This contribution introduces a novel technique designed to deal with label skewed non-IID data, using adversarial inputs, created by the I-FGSM method. Adversarial inputs guide the training process and allow the Weighted Federated Averaging to give more importance to clients with 'selected' local label distributions. Experimental results, gathered from image classification tasks, for MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets, are reported and analyzed.