Federated Deep Equilibrium Learning: A Compact Shared Representation for Edge Communication Efficiency

Federated Learning (FL) is a prominent distributed learning paradigm facilitating collaboration among nodes within an edge network to co-train a global model without centralizing data. By shifting computation to the network edge, FL offers robust and responsive edge-AI solutions and enhance privacy-preservation. However, deploying deep FL models within edge environments is often hindered by communication bottlenecks, data heterogeneity, and memory limitations. To address these challenges jointly, we introduce FeDEQ, a pioneering FL framework that effectively employs deep equilibrium learning and consensus optimization to exploit a compact shared data representation across edge nodes, allowing the derivation of personalized models specific to each node. We delve into a unique model structure composed of an equilibrium layer followed by traditional neural network layers. Here, the equilibrium layer functions as a global feature representation that edge nodes can adapt to personalize their local layers. Capitalizing on FeDEQ's compactness and representation power, we present a novel distributed algorithm rooted in the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) consensus optimization and theoretically establish its convergence for smooth objectives. Experiments across various benchmarks demonstrate that FeDEQ achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art personalized methods while employing models of up to 4 times smaller in communication size and 1.5 times lower memory footprint during training.

Federated PCA on Grassmann Manifold for Anomaly Detection in IoT Networks

In the era of Internet of Things (IoT), network-wide anomaly detection is a crucial part of monitoring IoT networks due to the inherent security vulnerabilities of most IoT devices. Principal Components Analysis (PCA) has been proposed to separate network traffics into two disjoint subspaces corresponding to normal and malicious behaviors for anomaly detection. However, the privacy concerns and limitations of devices' computing resources compromise the practical effectiveness of PCA. We propose a federated PCA-based Grassmannian optimization framework that coordinates IoT devices to aggregate a joint profile of normal network behaviors for anomaly detection. First, we introduce a privacy-preserving federated PCA framework to simultaneously capture the profile of various IoT devices' traffic. Then, we investigate the alternating direction method of multipliers gradient-based learning on the Grassmann manifold to guarantee fast training and the absence of detecting latency using limited computational resources. Empirical results on the NSL-KDD dataset demonstrate that our method outperforms baseline approaches. Finally, we show that the Grassmann manifold algorithm is highly adapted for IoT anomaly detection, which permits drastically reducing the analysis time of the system. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first federated PCA algorithm for anomaly detection meeting the requirements of IoT networks.

On the Generalization of Wasserstein Robust Federated Learning

In federated learning, participating clients typically possess non-i.i.d. data, posing a significant challenge to generalization to unseen distributions. To address this, we propose a Wasserstein distributionally robust optimization scheme called WAFL. Leveraging its duality, we frame WAFL as an empirical surrogate risk minimization problem, and solve it using a local SGD-based algorithm with convergence guarantees. We show that the robustness of WAFL is more general than related approaches, and the generalization bound is robust to all adversarial distributions inside the Wasserstein ball (ambiguity set). Since the center location and radius of the Wasserstein ball can be suitably modified, WAFL shows its applicability not only in robustness but also in domain adaptation. Through empirical evaluation, we demonstrate that WAFL generalizes better than the vanilla FedAvg in non-i.i.d. settings, and is more robust than other related methods in distribution shift settings. Further, using benchmark datasets we show that WAFL is capable of generalizing to unseen target domains.