联邦边缘推理

Deep learning-based edge detectors heavily rely on pixel-wise labels which are often provided by multiple annotators. Existing methods fuse multiple annotations using a simple voting process, ignoring the inherent ambiguity of edges and labeling bias of annotators. In this paper, we propose a novel uncertainty-aware edge detector (UAED), which employs uncertainty to investigate the subjectivity and ambiguity of diverse annotations. Specifically, we first convert the deterministic label space into a learnable Gaussian distribution, whose variance measures the degree of ambiguity among different annotations. Then we regard the learned variance as the estimated uncertainty of the predicted edge maps, and pixels with higher uncertainty are likely to be hard samples for edge detection. Therefore we design an adaptive weighting loss to emphasize the learning from those pixels with high uncertainty, which helps the network to gradually concentrate on the important pixels. UAED can be combined with various encoder-decoder backbones, and the extensive experiments demonstrate that UAED achieves superior performance consistently across multiple edge detection benchmarks. The source code is available at https://github.com/ZhouCX117/UAED.

Secure aggregation promises a heightened level of privacy in federated learning, maintaining that a server only has access to a decrypted aggregate update. Within this setting, linear layer leakage methods are the only data reconstruction attacks able to scale and achieve a high leakage rate regardless of the number of clients or batch size. This is done through increasing the size of an injected fully-connected (FC) layer. We show that this results in a resource overhead which grows larger with an increasing number of clients. We show that this resource overhead is caused by an incorrect perspective in all prior work that treats an attack on an aggregate update in the same way as an individual update with a larger batch size. Instead, by attacking the update from the perspective that aggregation is combining multiple individual updates, this allows the application of sparsity to alleviate resource overhead. We show that the use of sparsity can decrease the model size overhead by over 327x and the computation time by 3.34x compared to SOTA while maintaining equivalent total leakage rate, 77% even with 1000 clients in aggregation.

Federated learning (FL) is an attractive distributed learning paradigm supporting real-time continuous learning and client privacy by default. In most FL approaches, all edge clients are assumed to have sufficient computation capabilities to participate in the learning of a deep neural network (DNN) model. However, in real-life applications, some clients may have severely limited resources and can only train a much smaller local model. This paper presents ScaleFL, a novel FL approach with two distinctive mechanisms to handle resource heterogeneity and provide an equitable FL framework for all clients. First, ScaleFL adaptively scales down the DNN model along width and depth dimensions by leveraging early exits to find the best-fit models for resource-aware local training on distributed clients. In this way, ScaleFL provides an efficient balance of preserving basic and complex features in local model splits with various sizes for joint training while enabling fast inference for model deployment. Second, ScaleFL utilizes self-distillation among exit predictions during training to improve aggregation through knowledge transfer among subnetworks. We conduct extensive experiments on benchmark CV (CIFAR-10/100, ImageNet) and NLP datasets (SST-2, AgNews). We demonstrate that ScaleFL outperforms existing representative heterogeneous FL approaches in terms of global/local model performance and provides inference efficiency, with up to 2x latency and 4x model size reduction with negligible performance drop below 2%.

Although federated learning has made awe-inspiring advances, most studies have assumed that the client's data are fully labeled. However, in a real-world scenario, every client may have a significant amount of unlabeled instances. Among the various approaches to utilizing unlabeled data, a federated active learning framework has emerged as a promising solution. In the decentralized setting, there are two types of available query selector models, namely 'global' and 'local-only' models, but little literature discusses their performance dominance and its causes. In this work, we first demonstrate that the superiority of two selector models depends on the global and local inter-class diversity. Furthermore, we observe that the global and local-only models are the keys to resolving the imbalance of each side. Based on our findings, we propose LoGo, a FAL sampling strategy robust to varying local heterogeneity levels and global imbalance ratio, that integrates both models by two steps of active selection scheme. LoGo consistently outperforms six active learning strategies in the total number of 38 experimental settings.

Data heterogeneity across clients is a key challenge in federated learning. Prior works address this by either aligning client and server models or using control variates to correct client model drift. Although these methods achieve fast convergence in convex or simple non-convex problems, the performance in over-parameterized models such as deep neural networks is lacking. In this paper, we first revisit the widely used FedAvg algorithm in a deep neural network to understand how data heterogeneity influences the gradient updates across the neural network layers. We observe that while the feature extraction layers are learned efficiently by FedAvg, the substantial diversity of the final classification layers across clients impedes the performance. Motivated by this, we propose to correct model drift by variance reduction only on the final layers. We demonstrate that this significantly outperforms existing benchmarks at a similar or lower communication cost. We furthermore provide proof for the convergence rate of our algorithm.

To defend the inference attacks and mitigate the sensitive information leakages in Federated Learning (FL), client-level Differentially Private FL (DPFL) is the de-facto standard for privacy protection by clipping local updates and adding random noise. However, existing DPFL methods tend to make a sharper loss landscape and have poorer weight perturbation robustness, resulting in severe performance degradation. To alleviate these issues, we propose a novel DPFL algorithm named DP-FedSAM, which leverages gradient perturbation to mitigate the negative impact of DP. Specifically, DP-FedSAM integrates Sharpness Aware Minimization (SAM) optimizer to generate local flatness models with better stability and weight perturbation robustness, which results in the small norm of local updates and robustness to DP noise, thereby improving the performance. From the theoretical perspective, we analyze in detail how DP-FedSAM mitigates the performance degradation induced by DP. Meanwhile, we give rigorous privacy guarantees with Renyi DP and present the sensitivity analysis of local updates. At last, we empirically confirm that our algorithm achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance compared with existing SOTA baselines in DPFL.

Personalized federated learning (pFL) collaboratively trains personalized models, which provides a customized model solution for individual clients in the presence of heterogeneous distributed local data. Although many recent studies have applied various algorithms to enhance personalization in pFL, they mainly focus on improving the performance from averaging or top perspective. However, part of the clients may fall into poor performance and are not clearly discussed. Therefore, how to prevent these poor clients should be considered critically. Intuitively, these poor clients may come from biased universal information shared with others. To address this issue, we propose a novel pFL strategy, called Personalize Locally, Generalize Universally (PLGU). PLGU generalizes the fine-grained universal information and moderates its biased performance by designing a Layer-Wised Sharpness Aware Minimization (LWSAM) algorithm while keeping the personalization local. Specifically, we embed our proposed PLGU strategy into two pFL schemes concluded in this paper: with/without a global model, and present the training procedures in detail. Through in-depth study, we show that the proposed PLGU strategy achieves competitive generalization bounds on both considered pFL schemes. Our extensive experimental results show that all the proposed PLGU based-algorithms achieve state-of-the-art performance.