arXiv subjects

Chaoyang He

Publications and source records attributed to Chaoyang He.

46 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2021

Advances and Open Problems in Federated Learning

Federated learning (FL) is a machine learning setting where many clients (e.g. mobile devices or whole organizations) collaboratively train a model under the orchestration of a central server (e.g. service provider), while keeping the training data decentralized. FL embodies the principles of focused data collection and minimization, and can mitigate many of the systemic privacy risks and costs resulting from traditional, centralized machine learning and data science approaches. Motivated by the explosive growth in FL research, this paper discusses recent advances and presents an extensive collection of open problems and challenges.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

PipeTransformer: Automated Elastic Pipelining for Distributed Training of Transformers

The size of Transformer models is growing at an unprecedented pace. It has only taken less than one year to reach trillion-level parameters after the release of GPT-3 (175B). Training such models requires both substantial engineering efforts and enormous computing resources, which are luxuries most research teams cannot afford. In this paper, we propose PipeTransformer, which leverages automated and elastic pipelining and data parallelism for efficient distributed training of Transformer models. PipeTransformer automatically adjusts the pipelining and data parallelism by identifying and freezing some layers during the training, and instead allocates resources for training of the remaining active layers. More specifically, PipeTransformer dynamically excludes converged layers from the pipeline, packs active layers into fewer GPUs, and forks more replicas to increase data-parallel width. We evaluate PipeTransformer using Vision Transformer (ViT) on ImageNet and BERT on GLUE and SQuAD datasets. Our results show that PipeTransformer attains a 2.4 fold speedup compared to the state-of-the-art baseline. We also provide various performance analyses for a more comprehensive understanding of our algorithmic and system-wise design. We also develop open-sourced flexible APIs for PipeTransformer, which offer a clean separation among the freeze algorithm, model definitions, and training accelerations, hence allowing it to be applied to other algorithms that require similar freezing strategies.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Towards Non-I.I.D. and Invisible Data with FedNAS: Federated Deep Learning via Neural Architecture Search

Federated Learning (FL) has been proved to be an effective learning framework when data cannot be centralized due to privacy, communication costs, and regulatory restrictions. When training deep learning models under an FL setting, people employ the predefined model architecture discovered in the centralized environment. However, this predefined architecture may not be the optimal choice because it may not fit data with non-identical and independent distribution (non-IID). Thus, we advocate automating federated learning (AutoFL) to improve model accuracy and reduce the manual design effort. We specifically study AutoFL via Neural Architecture Search (NAS), which can automate the design process. We propose a Federated NAS (FedNAS) algorithm to help scattered workers collaboratively searching for a better architecture with higher accuracy. We also build a system based on FedNAS. Our experiments on non-IID dataset show that the architecture searched by FedNAS can outperform the manually predefined architecture.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

FedML: A Research Library and Benchmark for Federated Machine Learning

Federated learning (FL) is a rapidly growing research field in machine learning. However, existing FL libraries cannot adequately support diverse algorithmic development; inconsistent dataset and model usage make fair algorithm comparison challenging. In this work, we introduce FedML, an open research library and benchmark to facilitate FL algorithm development and fair performance comparison. FedML supports three computing paradigms: on-device training for edge devices, distributed computing, and single-machine simulation. FedML also promotes diverse algorithmic research with flexible and generic API design and comprehensive reference baseline implementations (optimizer, models, and datasets). We hope FedML could provide an efficient and reproducible means for developing and evaluating FL algorithms that would benefit the FL research community. We maintain the source code, documents, and user community at https://fedml.ai.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

Group Knowledge Transfer: Federated Learning of Large CNNs at the Edge

Scaling up the convolutional neural network (CNN) size (e.g., width, depth, etc.) is known to effectively improve model accuracy. However, the large model size impedes training on resource-constrained edge devices. For instance, federated learning (FL) may place undue burden on the compute capability of edge nodes, even though there is a strong practical need for FL due to its privacy and confidentiality properties. To address the resource-constrained reality of edge devices, we reformulate FL as a group knowledge transfer training algorithm, called FedGKT. FedGKT designs a variant of the alternating minimization approach to train small CNNs on edge nodes and periodically transfer their knowledge by knowledge distillation to a large server-side CNN. FedGKT consolidates several advantages into a single framework: reduced demand for edge computation, lower communication bandwidth for large CNNs, and asynchronous training, all while maintaining model accuracy comparable to FedAvg. We train CNNs designed based on ResNet-56 and ResNet-110 using three distinct datasets (CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and CINIC-10) and their non-I.I.D. variants. Our results show that FedGKT can obtain comparable or even slightly higher accuracy than FedAvg. More importantly, FedGKT makes edge training affordable. Compared to the edge training using FedAvg, FedGKT demands 9 to 17 times less computational power (FLOPs) on edge devices and requires 54 to 105 times fewer parameters in the edge CNN. Our source code is released at FedML (https://fedml.ai).

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

Cascade-BGNN: Toward Efficient Self-supervised Representation Learning on Large-scale Bipartite Graphs

Bipartite graphs have been used to represent data relationships in many data-mining applications such as in E-commerce recommendation systems. Since learning in graph space is more complicated than in Euclidian space, recent studies have extensively utilized neural nets to effectively and efficiently embed a graph's nodes into a multidimensional space. However, this embedding method has not yet been applied to large-scale bipartite graphs. Existing techniques either cannot be scaled to large-scale bipartite graphs that have limited labels or cannot exploit the unique structure of bipartite graphs, which have distinct node features in two domains. Thus, we propose Cascade Bipartite Graph Neural Networks, Cascade-BGNN, a novel node representation learning for bipartite graphs that is domain-consistent, self-supervised, and efficient. To efficiently aggregate information both across and within the two partitions of a bipartite graph, BGNN utilizes a customized Inter-domain Message Passing (IDMP) and Intra-domain Alignment (IDA), which is our adaptation of adversarial learning, for message aggregation across and within partitions, respectively. BGNN is trained in a self-supervised manner. Moreover, we formulate a multi-layer BGNN in a cascaded training manner to enable multi-hop relationship modeling while improving training efficiency. Extensive experiments on several datasets of varying scales verify the effectiveness and efficiency of BGNN over baselines. Our design is further affirmed through theoretical analysis for domain alignment. The scalability of BGNN is additionally verified through its demonstrated rapid training speed and low memory cost over a large-scale real-world bipartite graph.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2020

Central Server Free Federated Learning over Single-sided Trust Social Networks

Federated learning has become increasingly important for modern machine learning, especially for data privacy-sensitive scenarios. Existing federated learning mostly adopts the central server-based architecture or centralized architecture. However, in many social network scenarios, centralized federated learning is not applicable (e.g., a central agent or server connecting all users may not exist, or the communication cost to the central server is not affordable). In this paper, we consider a generic setting: 1) the central server may not exist, and 2) the social network is unidirectional or of single-sided trust (i.e., user A trusts user B but user B may not trust user A). We propose a central server free federated learning algorithm, named Online Push-Sum (OPS) method, to handle this challenging but generic scenario. A rigorous regret analysis is also provided, which shows very interesting results on how users can benefit from communication with trusted users in the federated learning scenario. This work builds upon the fundamental algorithm framework and theoretical guarantees for federated learning in the generic social network scenario.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

MiLeNAS: Efficient Neural Architecture Search via Mixed-Level Reformulation

Many recently proposed methods for Neural Architecture Search (NAS) can be formulated as bilevel optimization. For efficient implementation, its solution requires approximations of second-order methods. In this paper, we demonstrate that gradient errors caused by such approximations lead to suboptimality, in the sense that the optimization procedure fails to converge to a (locally) optimal solution. To remedy this, this paper proposes \mldas, a mixed-level reformulation for NAS that can be optimized efficiently and reliably. It is shown that even when using a simple first-order method on the mixed-level formulation, \mldas\ can achieve a lower validation error for NAS problems. Consequently, architectures obtained by our method achieve consistently higher accuracies than those obtained from bilevel optimization. Moreover, \mldas\ proposes a framework beyond DARTS. It is upgraded via model size-based search and early stopping strategies to complete the search process in around 5 hours. Extensive experiments within the convolutional architecture search space validate the effectiveness of our approach.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2019

Collecting Indicators of Compromise from Unstructured Text of Cybersecurity Articles using Neural-Based Sequence Labelling

Indicators of Compromise (IOCs) are artifacts observed on a network or in an operating system that can be utilized to indicate a computer intrusion and detect cyber-attacks in an early stage. Thus, they exert an important role in the field of cybersecurity. However, state-of-the-art IOCs detection systems rely heavily on hand-crafted features with expert knowledge of cybersecurity, and require large-scale manually annotated corpora to train an IOC classifier. In this paper, we propose using an end-to-end neural-based sequence labelling model to identify IOCs automatically from cybersecurity articles without expert knowledge of cybersecurity. By using a multi-head self-attention module and contextual features, we find that the proposed model is capable of gathering contextual information from texts of cybersecurity articles and performs better in the task of IOC identification. Experiments show that the proposed model outperforms other sequence labelling models, achieving the average F1-score of 89.0% on English cybersecurity article test set, and approximately the average F1-score of 81.8% on Chinese test set.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2019

Efficient Spatial Anti-Aliasing Rendering for Line Joins on Vector Maps

The spatial anti-aliasing technique for line joins (intersections of the road segments) on vector maps is exclusively crucial to visual experience and system performance. Due to limitations of OpenGL API, one common practice to achieve the anti-aliased effect is splicing multiple triangles at varying scale levels to approximate the fan-shaped line joins. However, this approximation inevitably produces some unreality, and the system rendering performance is not optimal. To circumvent these drawbacks, in this paper, we propose a simple but efficient algorithm which uses only two triangles to substitute the multiple triangles approximation and then renders a realistic fan-shaped curve with alpha operation based on geometrical relation computing. Our experiment shows it has advantages of a realistic anti-aliasing effect, less memory cost, higher frame rate, and drawing line joins without overlapping rendering. Our proposed spatial anti-aliasing technique has been widely used in Internet Maps such as Tencent Mobile Maps and Tencent Automotive Maps.

cs.GR↗