Empowering Federated Learning with Implicit Gossiping: Mitigating Connection Unreliability Amidst Unknown and Arbitrary Dynamics

Federated learning is a popular distributed learning approach for training a machine learning model without disclosing raw data. It consists of a parameter server and a possibly large collection of clients (e.g., in cross-device federated learning) that may operate in congested and changing environments. In this paper, we study federated learning in the presence of stochastic and dynamic communication failures wherein the uplink between the parameter server and client $i$ is on with unknown probability $p_i^t$ in round $t$. Furthermore, we allow the dynamics of $p_i^t$ to be arbitrary. We first demonstrate that when the $p_i^t$'s vary across clients, the most widely adopted federated learning algorithm, Federated Average (FedAvg), experiences significant bias. To address this observation, we propose Federated Postponed Broadcast (FedPBC), a simple variant of FedAvg. FedPBC differs from FedAvg in that the parameter server postpones broadcasting the global model till the end of each round. Despite uplink failures, we show that FedPBC converges to a stationary point of the original non-convex objective. On the technical front, postponing the global model broadcasts enables implicit gossiping among the clients with active links in round $t$. Despite the time-varying nature of $p_i^t$, we can bound the perturbation of the global model dynamics using techniques to control gossip-type information mixing errors. Extensive experiments have been conducted on real-world datasets over diversified unreliable uplink patterns to corroborate our analysis.

RSBuilding: Towards General Remote Sensing Image Building Extraction and Change Detection with Foundation Model

The intelligent interpretation of buildings plays a significant role in urban planning and management, macroeconomic analysis, population dynamics, etc. Remote sensing image building interpretation primarily encompasses building extraction and change detection. However, current methodologies often treat these two tasks as separate entities, thereby failing to leverage shared knowledge. Moreover, the complexity and diversity of remote sensing image scenes pose additional challenges, as most algorithms are designed to model individual small datasets, thus lacking cross-scene generalization. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive remote sensing image building understanding model, termed RSBuilding, developed from the perspective of the foundation model. RSBuilding is designed to enhance cross-scene generalization and task universality. Specifically, we extract image features based on the prior knowledge of the foundation model and devise a multi-level feature sampler to augment scale information. To unify task representation and integrate image spatiotemporal clues, we introduce a cross-attention decoder with task prompts. Addressing the current shortage of datasets that incorporate annotations for both tasks, we have developed a federated training strategy to facilitate smooth model convergence even when supervision for some tasks is missing, thereby bolstering the complementarity of different tasks. Our model was trained on a dataset comprising up to 245,000 images and validated on multiple building extraction and change detection datasets. The experimental results substantiate that RSBuilding can concurrently handle two structurally distinct tasks and exhibits robust zero-shot generalization capabilities.

Network Fault-tolerant and Byzantine-resilient Social Learning via Collaborative Hierarchical Non-Bayesian Learning

As the network scale increases, existing fully distributed solutions start to lag behind the real-world challenges such as (1) slow information propagation, (2) network communication failures, and (3) external adversarial attacks. In this paper, we focus on hierarchical system architecture and address the problem of non-Bayesian learning over networks that are vulnerable to communication failures and adversarial attacks. On network communication, we consider packet-dropping link failures. We first propose a hierarchical robust push-sum algorithm that can achieve average consensus despite frequent packet-dropping link failures. We provide a sparse information fusion rule between the parameter server and arbitrarily selected network representatives. Then, interleaving the consensus update step with a dual averaging update with Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence as the proximal function, we obtain a packet-dropping fault-tolerant non-Bayesian learning algorithm with provable convergence guarantees. On external adversarial attacks, we consider Byzantine attacks in which the compromised agents can send maliciously calibrated messages to others (including both the agents and the parameter server). To avoid the curse of dimensionality of Byzantine consensus, we solve the non-Bayesian learning problem via running multiple dynamics, each of which only involves Byzantine consensus with scalar inputs. To facilitate resilient information propagation across sub-networks, we use a novel Byzantine-resilient gossiping-type rule at the parameter server.

Fast and Robust State Estimation and Tracking via Hierarchical Learning

Fully distributed estimation and tracking solutions to large-scale multi-agent networks suffer slow convergence and are vulnerable to network failures. In this paper, we aim to speed up the convergence and enhance the resilience of state estimation and tracking using a simple hierarchical system architecture wherein agents are clusters into smaller networks, and a parameter server exists to aid the information exchanges among networks. The information exchange among networks is expensive and occurs only once in a while. We propose two consensus + innovation algorithms for the state estimation and tracking problems, respectively. In both algorithms, we use a novel hierarchical push-sum consensus component. For the state estimation, we use dual averaging as the local innovation component. State tracking is much harder to tackle in the presence of dropping-link failures and the standard integration of the consensus and innovation approaches are no longer applicable. Moreover, dual averaging is no longer feasible. Our algorithm introduces a pair of additional variables per link and ensure the relevant local variables evolve according to the state dynamics, and use projected local gradient descent as the local innovation component. We also characterize the convergence rates of both of the algorithms under linear local observation model and minimal technical assumptions. We numerically validate our algorithm through simulation of both state estimation and tracking problems.

Towards Bias Correction of FedAvg over Nonuniform and Time-Varying Communications

Federated learning (FL) is a decentralized learning framework wherein a parameter server (PS) and a collection of clients collaboratively train a model via minimizing a global objective. Communication bandwidth is a scarce resource; in each round, the PS aggregates the updates from a subset of clients only. In this paper, we focus on non-convex minimization that is vulnerable to non-uniform and time-varying communication failures between the PS and the clients. Specifically, in each round $t$, the link between the PS and client $i$ is active with probability $p_i^t$, which is $\textit{unknown}$ to both the PS and the clients. This arises when the channel conditions are heterogeneous across clients and are changing over time. We show that when the $p_i^t$'s are not uniform, $\textit{Federated Average}$ (FedAvg) -- the most widely adopted FL algorithm -- fails to minimize the global objective. Observing this, we propose $\textit{Federated Postponed Broadcast}$ (FedPBC) which is a simple variant of FedAvg. It differs from FedAvg in that the PS postpones broadcasting the global model till the end of each round. We show that FedPBC converges to a stationary point of the original objective. The introduced staleness is mild and there is no noticeable slowdown. Both theoretical analysis and numerical results are provided. On the technical front, postponing the global model broadcasts enables implicit gossiping among the clients with active links at round $t$. Despite $p_i^t$'s are time-varying, we are able to bound the perturbation of the global model dynamics via the techniques of controlling the gossip-type information mixing errors.

Federated Learning in the Presence of Adversarial Client Unavailability

Federated learning is a decentralized machine learning framework wherein not all clients are able to participate in each round. An emerging line of research is devoted to tackling arbitrary client unavailability. Existing theoretical analysis imposes restrictive structural assumptions on the unavailability patterns, and their proposed algorithms were tailored to those assumptions. In this paper, we relax those assumptions and consider adversarial client unavailability. To quantify the degrees of client unavailability, we use the notion of {\em $\epsilon$-adversary dropout fraction}. For both non-convex and strongly-convex global objectives, we show that simple variants of FedAvg or FedProx, albeit completely agnostic to $\epsilon$, converge to an estimation error on the order of $\epsilon (G^2 + \sigma^2)$, where $G$ is a heterogeneity parameter and $\sigma^2$ is the noise level. We prove that this estimation error is minimax-optimal. We also show that the variants of FedAvg or FedProx have convergence speeds $O(1/\sqrt{T})$ for non-convex objectives and $O(1/T)$ for strongly-convex objectives, both of which are the best possible for any first-order method that only has access to noisy gradients. Our proofs build upon a tight analysis of the selection bias that persists in the entire learning process. We validate our theoretical prediction through numerical experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets.

Privacy-preserving and Uncertainty-aware Federated Trajectory Prediction for Connected Autonomous Vehicles

Deep learning is the method of choice for trajectory prediction for autonomous vehicles. Unfortunately, its data-hungry nature implicitly requires the availability of sufficiently rich and high-quality centralized datasets, which easily leads to privacy leakage. Besides, uncertainty-awareness becomes increasingly important for safety-crucial cyber physical systems whose prediction module heavily relies on machine learning tools. In this paper, we relax the data collection requirement and enhance uncertainty-awareness by using Federated Learning on Connected Autonomous Vehicles with an uncertainty-aware global objective. We name our algorithm as FLTP. We further introduce ALFLTP which boosts FLTP via using active learning techniques in adaptatively selecting participating clients. We consider both negative log-likelihood (NLL) and aleatoric uncertainty (AU) as client selection metrics. Experiments on Argoverse dataset show that FLTP significantly outperforms the model trained on local data. In addition, ALFLTP-AU converges faster in training regression loss and performs better in terms of NLL, minADE and MR than FLTP in most rounds, and has more stable round-wise performance than ALFLTP-NLL.

$β$-Stochastic Sign SGD: A Byzantine Resilient and Differentially Private Gradient Compressor for Federated Learning

Federated Learning (FL) is a nascent privacy-preserving learning framework under which the local data of participating clients is kept locally throughout model training. Scarce communication resources and data heterogeneity are two defining characteristics of FL. Besides, a FL system is often implemented in a harsh environment -- leaving the clients vulnerable to Byzantine attacks. To the best of our knowledge, no gradient compressors simultaneously achieve quantitative Byzantine resilience and privacy preservation. In this paper, we fill this gap via revisiting the stochastic sign SGD \cite{jin 2020}. We propose $\beta$-stochastic sign SGD, which contains a gradient compressor that encodes a client's gradient information in sign bits subject to the privacy budget $\beta>0$. We show that as long as $\beta>0$, $\beta$-stochastic sign SGD converges in the presence of partial client participation and mobile Byzantine faults, showing that it achieves quantifiable Byzantine-resilience and differential privacy simultaneously. In sharp contrast, when $\beta=0$, the compressor is not differentially private. Notably, for the special case when each of the stochastic gradients involved is bounded with known bounds, our gradient compressor with $\beta=0$ coincides with the compressor proposed in \cite{jin 2020}. As a byproduct, we show that when the clients report sign messages, the popular information aggregation rules simple mean, trimmed mean, median and majority vote are identical in terms of the output signs. Our theories are corroborated by experiments on MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets.

Global Convergence of Federated Learning for Mixed Regression

This paper studies the problem of model training under Federated Learning when clients exhibit cluster structure. We contextualize this problem in mixed regression, where each client has limited local data generated from one of $k$ unknown regression models. We design an algorithm that achieves global convergence from any initialization, and works even when local data volume is highly unbalanced -- there could exist clients that contain $O(1)$ data points only. Our algorithm first runs moment descent on a few anchor clients (each with $\tilde{\Omega}(k)$ data points) to obtain coarse model estimates. Then each client alternately estimates its cluster labels and refines the model estimates based on FedAvg or FedProx. A key innovation in our analysis is a uniform estimate on the clustering errors, which we prove by bounding the VC dimension of general polynomial concept classes based on the theory of algebraic geometry.

Achieving Statistical Optimality of Federated Learning: Beyond Stationary Points

Federated Learning (FL) is a promising framework that has great potentials in privacy preservation and in lowering the computation load at the cloud. FedAvg and FedProx are two widely adopted algorithms. However, recent work raised concerns on these two methods: (1) their fixed points do not correspond to the stationary points of the original optimization problem, and (2) the common model found might not generalize well locally. In this paper, we alleviate these concerns. Towards this, we adopt the statistical learning perspective yet allow the distributions to be heterogeneous and the local data to be unbalanced. We show, in the general kernel regression setting, that both FedAvg and FedProx converge to the minimax-optimal error rates. Moreover, when the kernel function has a finite rank, the convergence is exponentially fast. Our results further analytically quantify the impact of the model heterogeneity and characterize the federation gain - the reduction of the estimation error for a worker to join the federated learning compared to the best local estimator. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to show the achievability of minimax error rates under FedAvg and FedProx, and the first to characterize the gains in joining FL. Numerical experiments further corroborate our theoretical findings on the statistical optimality of FedAvg and FedProx and the federation gains.