OnDev-LCT: On-Device Lightweight Convolutional Transformers towards federated learning.

Federated learning (FL) has emerged as a promising approach to collaboratively train machine learning models across multiple edge devices while preserving privacy. The success of FL hinges on the efficiency of participating models and their ability to handle the unique challenges of distributed learning. While several variants of Vision Transformer (ViT) have shown great potential as alternatives to modern convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for centralized training, the unprecedented size and higher computational demands hinder their deployment on resource-constrained edge devices, challenging their widespread application in FL. Since client devices in FL typically have limited computing resources and communication bandwidth, models intended for such devices must strike a balance between model size, computational efficiency, and the ability to adapt to the diverse and non-IID data distributions encountered in FL. To address these challenges, we propose OnDev-LCT: Lightweight Convolutional Transformers for On-Device vision tasks with limited training data and resources. Our models incorporate image-specific inductive biases through the LCT tokenizer by leveraging efficient depthwise separable convolutions in residual linear bottleneck blocks to extract local features, while the multi-head self-attention (MHSA) mechanism in the LCT encoder implicitly facilitates capturing global representations of images. Extensive experiments on benchmark image datasets indicate that our models outperform existing lightweight vision models while having fewer parameters and lower computational demands, making them suitable for FL scenarios with data heterogeneity and communication bottlenecks.

Contrastive encoder pre-training-based clustered federated learning for heterogeneous data.

Federated learning (FL) is a promising approach that enables distributed clients to collaboratively train a global model while preserving their data privacy. However, FL often suffers from data heterogeneity problems, which can significantly affect its performance. To address this, clustered federated learning (CFL) has been proposed to construct personalized models for different client clusters. One effective client clustering strategy is to allow clients to choose their own local models from a model pool based on their performance. However, without pre-trained model parameters, such a strategy is prone to clustering failure, in which all clients choose the same model. Unfortunately, collecting a large amount of labeled data for pre-training can be costly and impractical in distributed environments. To overcome this challenge, we leverage self-supervised contrastive learning to exploit unlabeled data for the pre-training of FL systems. Together, self-supervised pre-training and client clustering can be crucial components for tackling the data heterogeneity issues of FL. Leveraging these two crucial strategies, we propose contrastive pre-training-based clustered federated learning (CP-CFL) to improve the model convergence and overall performance of FL systems. In this work, we demonstrate the effectiveness of CP-CFL through extensive experiments in heterogeneous FL settings, and present various interesting observations.

Self-Organizing Democratized Learning: Toward Large-Scale Distributed Learning Systems.

Emerging cross-device artificial intelligence (AI) applications require a transition from conventional centralized learning systems toward large-scale distributed AI systems that can collaboratively perform complex learning tasks. In this regard, democratized learning (Dem-AI) lays out a holistic philosophy with underlying principles for building large-scale distributed and democratized machine learning systems. The outlined principles are meant to study a generalization in distributed learning systems that go beyond existing mechanisms such as federated learning (FL). Moreover, such learning systems rely on hierarchical self-organization of well-connected distributed learning agents who have limited and highly personalized data and can evolve and regulate themselves based on the underlying duality of specialized and generalized processes. Inspired by Dem-AI philosophy, a novel distributed learning approach is proposed in this article. The approach consists of a self-organizing hierarchical structuring mechanism based on agglomerative clustering, hierarchical generalization, and corresponding learning mechanism. Subsequently, hierarchical generalized learning problems in recursive forms are formulated and shown to be approximately solved using the solutions of distributed personalized learning problems and hierarchical update mechanisms. To that end, a distributed learning algorithm, namely DemLearn, is proposed. Extensive experiments on benchmark MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, FE-MNIST, and CIFAR-10 datasets show that the proposed algorithm demonstrates better results in the generalization performance of learning models in agents compared to the conventional FL algorithms. The detailed analysis provides useful observations to further handle both the generalization and specialization performance of the learning models in Dem-AI systems.