Navigating Data Heterogeneity in Federated Learning A Semi-Supervised Approach for Object Detection

Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a potent framework for training models across distributed data sources while maintaining data privacy. Nevertheless, it faces challenges with limited high-quality labels and non-IID client data, particularly in applications like autonomous driving. To address these hurdles, we navigate the uncharted waters of Semi-Supervised Federated Object Detection (SSFOD). We present a pioneering SSFOD framework, designed for scenarios where labeled data reside only at the server while clients possess unlabeled data. Notably, our method represents the inaugural implementation of SSFOD for clients with 0% labeled non-IID data, a stark contrast to previous studies that maintain some subset of labels at each client. We propose FedSTO, a two-stage strategy encompassing Selective Training followed by Orthogonally enhanced full-parameter training, to effectively address data shift (e.g. weather conditions) between server and clients. Our contributions include selectively refining the backbone of the detector to avert overfitting, orthogonality regularization to boost representation divergence, and local EMA-driven pseudo label assignment to yield high-quality pseudo labels. Extensive validation on prominent autonomous driving datasets (BDD100K, Cityscapes, and SODA10M) attests to the efficacy of our approach, demonstrating state-of-the-art results. Remarkably, FedSTO, using just 20-30% of labels, performs nearly as well as fully-supervised centralized training methods.

Does fine-tuning GPT-3 with the OpenAI API leak personally-identifiable information?

Machine learning practitioners often fine-tune generative pre-trained models like GPT-3 to improve model performance at specific tasks. Previous works, however, suggest that fine-tuned machine learning models memorize and emit sensitive information from the original fine-tuning dataset. Companies such as OpenAI offer fine-tuning services for their models, but no prior work has conducted a memorization attack on any closed-source models. In this work, we simulate a privacy attack on GPT-3 using OpenAI's fine-tuning API. Our objective is to determine if personally identifiable information (PII) can be extracted from this model. We (1) explore the use of naive prompting methods on a GPT-3 fine-tuned classification model, and (2) we design a practical word generation task called Autocomplete to investigate the extent of PII memorization in fine-tuned GPT-3 within a real-world context. Our findings reveal that fine-tuning GPT3 for both tasks led to the model memorizing and disclosing critical personally identifiable information (PII) obtained from the underlying fine-tuning dataset. To encourage further research, we have made our codes and datasets publicly available on GitHub at: https://github.com/albertsun1/gpt3-pii-attacks

oneDNN Graph Compiler: A Hybrid Approach for High-Performance Deep Learning Compilation

With the rapid development of deep learning models and hardware support for dense computing, the deep learning (DL) workload characteristics changed significantly from a few hot spots on compute-intensive operations to a broad range of operations scattered across the models. Accelerating a few compute-intensive operations using the expert-tuned implementation of primitives does not fully exploit the performance potential of AI hardware. Various efforts are made to compile a full deep neural network (DNN) graph. One of the biggest challenges is to achieve end-to-end compilation by generating expert-level performance code for the dense compute-intensive operations and applying compilation optimization at the scope of DNN computation graph across multiple compute-intensive operations. We present oneDNN Graph Compiler, a tensor compiler that employs a hybrid approach of using techniques from both compiler optimization and expert-tuned kernels for high-performance code generation of the deep neural network graph. oneDNN Graph Compiler addresses unique optimization challenges in the deep learning domain, such as low-precision computation, aggressive fusion, optimization for static tensor shapes and memory layout, constant weight optimization, and memory buffer reuse. Experimental results demonstrate up to 2x performance gains over primitives-based optimization for performance-critical DNN computation graph patterns on Intel Xeon Scalable Processors.

TinyFedTL: Federated Transfer Learning on Tiny Devices

TinyML has rose to popularity in an era where data is everywhere. However, the data that is in most demand is subject to strict privacy and security guarantees. In addition, the deployment of TinyML hardware in the real world has significant memory and communication constraints that traditional ML fails to address. In light of these challenges, we present TinyFedTL, the first implementation of federated transfer learning on a resource-constrained microcontroller.

FedCD: Improving Performance in non-IID Federated Learning

Federated learning has been widely applied to enable decentralized devices, which each have their own local data, to learn a shared model. However, learning from real-world data can be challenging, as it is rarely identically and independently distributed (IID) across edge devices (a key assumption for current high-performing and low-bandwidth algorithms). We present a novel approach, FedCD, which clones and deletes models to dynamically group devices with similar data. Experiments on the CIFAR-10 dataset show that FedCD achieves higher accuracy and faster convergence compared to a FedAvg baseline on non-IID data while incurring minimal computation, communication, and storage overheads.

FedFMC: Sequential Efficient Federated Learning on Non-iid Data

As a mechanism for devices to update a global model without sharing data, federated learning bridges the tension between the need for data and respect for privacy. However, classic FL methods like Federated Averaging struggle with non-iid data, a prevalent situation in the real world. Previous solutions are sub-optimal as they either employ a small shared global subset of data or greater number of models with increased communication costs. We propose FedFMC (Fork-Merge-Consolidate), a method that dynamically forks devices into updating different global models then merges and consolidates separate models into one. We first show the soundness of FedFMC on simple datasets, then run several experiments comparing against baseline approaches. These experiments show that FedFMC substantially improves upon earlier approaches to non-iid data in the federated learning context without using a globally shared subset of data nor increase communication costs.

Robotic Room Traversal using Optical Range Finding

Consider the goal of visiting every part of a room that is not blocked by obstacles. Doing so efficiently requires both sensors and planning. Our findings suggest a method of inexpensive optical range finding for robotic room traversal. Our room traversal algorithm relies upon the approximate distance from the robot to the nearest obstacle in 360 degrees. We then choose the path with the furthest approximate distance. Since millimeter-precision is not required for our problem, we have opted to develop our own laser range finding solution, in lieu of using more common, but also expensive solutions like light detection and ranging (LIDAR). Rather, our solution uses a laser that casts a visible dot on the target and a common camera (an iPhone, for example). Based upon where in the camera frame the laser dot is detected, we may calculate an angle between our target and the laser aperture. Using this angle and the known distance between the camera eye and the laser aperture, we may solve all sides of a trigonometric model which provides the distance between the robot and the target.