Subspace Learning for Personalized Federated Optimization

As data is generated and stored almost everywhere, learning a model from a data-decentralized setting is a task of interest for many AI-driven service providers. Although federated learning is settled down as the main solution in such situations, there still exists room for improvement in terms of personalization. Training federated learning systems usually focuses on optimizing a global model that is identically deployed to all client devices. However, a single global model is not sufficient for each client to be personalized on their performance as local data assumes to be not identically distributed across clients. We propose a method to address this situation through the lens of ensemble learning based on the construction of a low-loss subspace continuum that generates a high-accuracy ensemble of two endpoints (i.e. global model and local model). We demonstrate that our method achieves consistent gains both in personalized and unseen client evaluation settings through extensive experiments on several standard benchmark datasets.

GRAFFL: Gradient-free Federated Learning of a Bayesian Generative Model

Federated learning platforms are gaining popularity. One of the major benefits is to mitigate the privacy risks as the learning of algorithms can be achieved without collecting or sharing data. While federated learning (i.e., many based on stochastic gradient algorithms) has shown great promise, there are still many challenging problems in protecting privacy, especially during the process of gradients update and exchange. This paper presents the first gradient-free federated learning framework called GRAFFL for learning a Bayesian generative model based on approximate Bayesian computation. Unlike conventional federated learning algorithms based on gradients, our framework does not require to disassemble a model (i.e., to linear components) or to perturb data (or encryption of data for aggregation) to preserve privacy. Instead, this framework uses implicit information derived from each participating institution to learn posterior distributions of parameters. The implicit information is summary statistics derived from SuffiAE that is a neural network developed in this study to create compressed and linearly separable representations thereby protecting sensitive information from leakage. As a sufficient dimensionality reduction technique, this is proved to provide sufficient summary statistics. We propose the GRAFFL-based Bayesian Gaussian mixture model to serve as a proof-of-concept of the framework. Using several datasets, we demonstrated the feasibility and usefulness of our model in terms of privacy protection and prediction performance (i.e., close to an ideal setting). The trained model as a quasi-global model can generate informative samples involving information from other institutions and enhances data analysis of each institution.

Privacy-preserving Federated Bayesian Learning of a Generative Model for Imbalanced Classification of Clinical Data

In clinical research, the lack of events of interest often necessitates imbalanced learning. One approach to resolve this obstacle is data integration or sharing, but due to privacy concerns neither is practical. Therefore, there is an increasing demand for a platform on which an analysis can be performed in a federated environment while maintaining privacy. However, it is quite challenging to develop a federated learning algorithm that can address both privacy-preserving and class imbalanced issues. In this study, we introduce a federated generative model learning platform for generating samples in a data-distributed environment while preserving privacy. We specifically propose approximate Bayesian computation-based Gaussian Mixture Model called 'Federated ABC-GMM', which can oversample data in a minor class by estimating the posterior distribution of model parameters across institutions in a privacy-preserving manner. PhysioNet2012, a dataset for prediction of mortality of patients in an Intensive Care Unit (ICU), was used to verify the performance of the proposed method. Experimental results show that our method boosts classification performance in terms of F1 score up to nearly an ideal situation. It is believed that the proposed method can be a novel alternative to solving class imbalance problems.