An End-to-End Encrypted Neural Network for Gradient Updates Transmission in Federated Learning

Federated learning is a distributed learning method to train a shared model by aggregating the locally-computed gradient updates. In federated learning, bandwidth and privacy are two main concerns of gradient updates transmission. This paper proposes an end-to-end encrypted neural network for gradient updates transmission. This network first encodes the input gradient updates to a lower-dimension space in each client, which significantly mitigates the pressure of data communication in federated learning. The encoded gradient updates are directly recovered as a whole, i.e. the aggregated gradient updates of the trained model, in the decoding layers of the network on the server. In this way, gradient updates encrypted in each client are not only prevented from interception during communication, but also unknown to the server. Based on the encrypted neural network, a novel federated learning framework is designed in real applications. Experimental results show that the proposed network can effectively achieve two goals, privacy protection and data compression, under a little sacrifice of the model accuracy in federated learning.

Two-Layer Mixture Network Ensemble for Apparel Attributes Classification

Recognizing apparel attributes has recently drawn great interest in the computer vision community. Methods based on various deep neural networks have been proposed for image classification, which could be applied to apparel attributes recognition. An interesting problem raised is how to ensemble these methods to further improve the accuracy. In this paper, we propose a two-layer mixture framework for ensemble different networks. In the first layer of this framework, two types of ensemble learning methods, bagging and boosting, are separately applied. Different from traditional methods, our bagging process makes use of the whole training set, not random subsets, to train each model in the ensemble, where several differentiated deep networks are used to promote model variance. To avoid the bias of small-scale samples, the second layer only adopts bagging to mix the results obtained with bagging and boosting in the first layer. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed mixture framework outperforms any individual network model or either independent ensemble method in apparel attributes classification.