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)

Lazy stochastic principal component analysis

Stochastic principal component analysis (SPCA) has become a popular dimensionality reduction strategy for large, high-dimensional datasets. We derive a simplified algorithm, called Lazy SPCA, which has reduced computational complexity and is better suited for large-scale distributed computation. We prove that SPCA and Lazy SPCA find the same approximations to the principal subspace, and that the pairwise distances between samples in the lower-dimensional space is invariant to whether SPCA is executed lazily or not. Empirical studies find downstream predictive performance to be identical for both methods, and superior to random projections, across a range of predictive models (linear regression, logistic lasso, and random forests). In our largest experiment with 4.6 million samples, Lazy SPCA reduced 43.7 hours of computation to 9.9 hours. Overall, Lazy SPCA relies exclusively on matrix multiplications, besides an operation on a small square matrix whose size depends only on the target dimensionality.