TPFL: Tsetlin-Personalized Federated Learning with Confidence-Based Clustering

The world of Machine Learning (ML) has witnessed rapid changes in terms of new models and ways to process users data. The majority of work that has been done is focused on Deep Learning (DL) based approaches. However, with the emergence of new algorithms such as the Tsetlin Machine (TM) algorithm, there is growing interest in exploring alternative approaches that may offer unique advantages in certain domains or applications. One of these domains is Federated Learning (FL), in which users privacy is of utmost importance. Due to its novelty, FL has seen a surge in the incorporation of personalization techniques to enhance model accuracy while maintaining user privacy under personalized conditions. In this work, we propose a novel approach dubbed TPFL: Tsetlin-Personalized Federated Learning, in which models are grouped into clusters based on their confidence towards a specific class. In this way, clustering can benefit from two key advantages. Firstly, clients share only what they are confident about, resulting in the elimination of wrongful weight aggregation among clients whose data for a specific class may have not been enough during the training. This phenomenon is prevalent when the data are non-Independent and Identically Distributed (non-IID). Secondly, by sharing only weights towards a specific class, communication cost is substantially reduced, making TPLF efficient in terms of both accuracy and communication cost. The results of TPFL demonstrated the highest accuracy on three different datasets; namely MNIST, FashionMNIST and FEMNIST.

FedBrain-Distill: Communication-Efficient Federated Brain Tumor Classification Using Ensemble Knowledge Distillation on Non-IID Data

Brain is one the most complex organs in the human body. Due to its complexity, classification of brain tumors still poses a significant challenge, making brain tumors a particularly serious medical issue. Techniques such as Machine Learning (ML) coupled with Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) have paved the way for doctors and medical institutions to classify different types of tumors. However, these techniques suffer from limitations that violate patients privacy. Federated Learning (FL) has recently been introduced to solve such an issue, but the FL itself suffers from limitations like communication costs and dependencies on model architecture, forcing all models to have identical architectures. In this paper, we propose FedBrain-Distill, an approach that leverages Knowledge Distillation (KD) in an FL setting that maintains the users privacy and ensures the independence of FL clients in terms of model architecture. FedBrain-Distill uses an ensemble of teachers that distill their knowledge to a simple student model. The evaluation of FedBrain-Distill demonstrated high-accuracy results for both Independent and Identically Distributed (IID) and non-IID data with substantial low communication costs on the real-world Figshare brain tumor dataset. It is worth mentioning that we used Dirichlet distribution to partition the data into IID and non-IID data. All the implementation details are accessible through our Github repository.