Searcharxiv⌕ Search

arXiv subjects

Haris Vikalo

Publications and source records attributed to Haris Vikalo.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

Heterogeneity-Guided Client Sampling: Towards Fast and Efficient Non-IID Federated Learning

Statistical heterogeneity of data present at client devices in a federated learning (FL) system renders the training of a global model in such systems difficult. Particularly challenging are the settings where due to communication resource constraints only a small fraction of clients can participate in any given round of FL. Recent approaches to training a global model in FL systems with non-IID data have focused on developing client selection methods that aim to sample clients with more informative updates of the model. However, existing client selection techniques either introduce significant computation overhead or perform well only in the scenarios where clients have data with similar heterogeneity profiles. In this paper, we propose HiCS-FL (Federated Learning via Hierarchical Clustered Sampling), a novel client selection method in which the server estimates statistical heterogeneity of a client's data using the client's update of the network's output layer and relies on this information to cluster and sample the clients. We analyze the ability of the proposed techniques to compare heterogeneity of different datasets, and characterize convergence of the training process that deploys the introduced client selection method. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that in non-IID settings HiCS-FL achieves faster convergence than state-of-the-art FL client selection schemes. Notably, HiCS-FL drastically reduces computation cost compared to existing selection schemes and is adaptable to different heterogeneity scenarios.

cs.LG↗

Recovering Labels from Local Updates in Federated Learning

Gradient inversion (GI) attacks present a threat to the privacy of clients in federated learning (FL) by aiming to enable reconstruction of the clients' data from communicated model updates. A number of such techniques attempts to accelerate data recovery by first reconstructing labels of the samples used in local training. However, existing label extraction methods make strong assumptions that typically do not hold in realistic FL settings. In this paper we present a novel label recovery scheme, Recovering Labels from Local Updates (RLU), which provides near-perfect accuracy when attacking untrained (most vulnerable) models. More significantly, RLU achieves high performance even in realistic real-world settings where the clients in an FL system run multiple local epochs, train on heterogeneous data, and deploy various optimizers to minimize different objective functions. Specifically, RLU estimates labels by solving a least-square problem that emerges from the analysis of the correlation between labels of the data points used in a training round and the resulting update of the output layer. The experimental results on several datasets, architectures, and data heterogeneity scenarios demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms existing baselines, and helps improve quality of the reconstructed images in GI attacks in terms of both PSNR and LPIPS.

cs.LG↗

Fed-QSSL: A Framework for Personalized Federated Learning under Bitwidth and Data Heterogeneity

Motivated by high resource costs of centralized machine learning schemes as well as data privacy concerns, federated learning (FL) emerged as an efficient alternative that relies on aggregating locally trained models rather than collecting clients' potentially private data. In practice, available resources and data distributions vary from one client to another, creating an inherent system heterogeneity that leads to deterioration of the performance of conventional FL algorithms. In this work, we present a federated quantization-based self-supervised learning scheme (Fed-QSSL) designed to address heterogeneity in FL systems. At clients' side, to tackle data heterogeneity we leverage distributed self-supervised learning while utilizing low-bit quantization to satisfy constraints imposed by local infrastructure and limited communication resources. At server's side, Fed-QSSL deploys de-quantization, weighted aggregation and re-quantization, ultimately creating models personalized to both data distribution as well as specific infrastructure of each client's device. We validated the proposed algorithm on real world datasets, demonstrating its efficacy, and theoretically analyzed impact of low-bit training on the convergence and robustness of the learned models.

cs.LG↗

Mixed-Precision Quantization for Federated Learning on Resource-Constrained Heterogeneous Devices

While federated learning (FL) systems often utilize quantization to battle communication and computational bottlenecks, they have heretofore been limited to deploying fixed-precision quantization schemes. Meanwhile, the concept of mixed-precision quantization (MPQ), where different layers of a deep learning model are assigned varying bit-width, remains unexplored in the FL settings. We present a novel FL algorithm, FedMPQ, which introduces mixed-precision quantization to resource-heterogeneous FL systems. Specifically, local models, quantized so as to satisfy bit-width constraint, are trained by optimizing an objective function that includes a regularization term which promotes reduction of precision in some of the layers without significant performance degradation. The server collects local model updates, de-quantizes them into full-precision models, and then aggregates them into a global model. To initialize the next round of local training, the server relies on the information learned in the previous training round to customize bit-width assignments of the models delivered to different clients. In extensive benchmarking experiments on several model architectures and different datasets in both iid and non-iid settings, FedMPQ outperformed the baseline FL schemes that utilize fixed-precision quantization while incurring only a minor computational overhead on the participating devices.

cs.LG↗

XVir: A Transformer-Based Architecture for Identifying Viral Reads from Cancer Samples

It is estimated that approximately 15% of cancers worldwide can be linked to viral infections. The viruses that can cause or increase the risk of cancer include human papillomavirus, hepatitis B and C viruses, Epstein-Barr virus, and human immunodeficiency virus, to name a few. The computational analysis of the massive amounts of tumor DNA data, whose collection is enabled by the recent advancements in sequencing technologies, have allowed studies of the potential association between cancers and viral pathogens. However, the high diversity of oncoviral families makes reliable detection of viral DNA difficult and thus, renders such analysis challenging. In this paper, we introduce XVir, a data pipeline that relies on a transformer-based deep learning architecture to reliably identify viral DNA present in human tumors. In particular, XVir is trained on genomic sequencing reads from viral and human genomes and may be used with tumor sequence information to find evidence of viral DNA in human cancers. Results on semi-experimental data demonstrate that XVir is capable of achieving high detection accuracy, generally outperforming state-of-the-art competing methods while being more compact and less computationally demanding.

q-bio.GN↗

Federated Learning in Non-IID Settings Aided by Differentially Private Synthetic Data

Federated learning (FL) is a privacy-promoting framework that enables potentially large number of clients to collaboratively train machine learning models. In a FL system, a server coordinates the collaboration by collecting and aggregating clients' model updates while the clients' data remains local and private. A major challenge in federated learning arises when the local data is heterogeneous -- the setting in which performance of the learned global model may deteriorate significantly compared to the scenario where the data is identically distributed across the clients. In this paper we propose FedDPMS (Federated Differentially Private Means Sharing), an FL algorithm in which clients deploy variational auto-encoders to augment local datasets with data synthesized using differentially private means of latent data representations communicated by a trusted server. Such augmentation ameliorates effects of data heterogeneity across the clients without compromising privacy. Our experiments on deep image classification tasks demonstrate that FedDPMS outperforms competing state-of-the-art FL methods specifically designed for heterogeneous data settings.

cs.LG↗

The Best of Both Worlds: Accurate Global and Personalized Models through Federated Learning with Data-Free Hyper-Knowledge Distillation

Heterogeneity of data distributed across clients limits the performance of global models trained through federated learning, especially in the settings with highly imbalanced class distributions of local datasets. In recent years, personalized federated learning (pFL) has emerged as a potential solution to the challenges presented by heterogeneous data. However, existing pFL methods typically enhance performance of local models at the expense of the global model's accuracy. We propose FedHKD (Federated Hyper-Knowledge Distillation), a novel FL algorithm in which clients rely on knowledge distillation (KD) to train local models. In particular, each client extracts and sends to the server the means of local data representations and the corresponding soft predictions -- information that we refer to as ``hyper-knowledge". The server aggregates this information and broadcasts it to the clients in support of local training. Notably, unlike other KD-based pFL methods, FedHKD does not rely on a public dataset nor it deploys a generative model at the server. We analyze convergence of FedHKD and conduct extensive experiments on visual datasets in a variety of scenarios, demonstrating that FedHKD provides significant improvement in both personalized as well as global model performance compared to state-of-the-art FL methods designed for heterogeneous data settings.

cs.LG↗

Automotive RADAR sub-sampling via object detection networks: Leveraging prior signal information

Automotive radar has increasingly attracted attention due to growing interest in autonomous driving technologies. Acquiring situational awareness using multimodal data collected at high sampling rates by various sensing devices including cameras, LiDAR, and radar requires considerable power, memory and compute resources which are often limited at an edge device. In this paper, we present a novel adaptive radar sub-sampling algorithm designed to identify regions that require more detailed/accurate reconstruction based on prior environmental conditions' knowledge, enabling near-optimal performance at considerably lower effective sampling rates. Designed to robustly perform under variable weather conditions, the algorithm was shown on the Oxford raw radar and RADIATE dataset to achieve accurate reconstruction utilizing only 10% of the original samples in good weather and 20% in extreme (snow, fog) weather conditions. A further modification of the algorithm incorporates object motion to enable reliable identification of important regions. This includes monitoring possible future occlusions caused by objects detected in the present frame. Finally, we train a YOLO network on the RADIATE dataset to perform object detection directly on RADAR data and obtain a 6.6% AP50 improvement over the baseline Faster R-CNN network.

cs.CV↗

Federated Learning Under Intermittent Client Availability and Time-Varying Communication Constraints

Federated learning systems facilitate training of global models in settings where potentially heterogeneous data is distributed across a large number of clients. Such systems operate in settings with intermittent client availability and/or time-varying communication constraints. As a result, the global models trained by federated learning systems may be biased towards clients with higher availability. We propose F3AST, an unbiased algorithm that dynamically learns an availability-dependent client selection strategy which asymptotically minimizes the impact of client-sampling variance on the global model convergence, enhancing performance of federated learning. The proposed algorithm is tested in a variety of settings for intermittently available clients under communication constraints, and its efficacy demonstrated on synthetic data and realistically federated benchmarking experiments using CIFAR100 and Shakespeare datasets. We show up to 186% and 8% accuracy improvements over FedAvg, and 8% and 7% over FedAdam on CIFAR100 and Shakespeare, respectively.

cs.LG↗

End-to-end system for object detection from sub-sampled radar data

Robust and accurate sensing is of critical importance for advancing autonomous automotive systems. The need to acquire situational awareness in complex urban conditions using sensors such as radar has motivated research on power and latency-efficient signal acquisition methods. In this paper, we present an end-to-end signal processing pipeline, capable of operating in extreme weather conditions, that relies on sub-sampled radar data to perform object detection in vehicular settings. The results of the object detection are further utilized to sub-sample forthcoming radar data, which stands in contrast to prior work where the sub-sampling relies on image information. We show robust detection based on radar data reconstructed using 20% of samples under extreme weather conditions such as snow or fog, and on low-illuminated nights. Additionally, we generate 20% sampled radar data in a fine-tuning set and show 1.1% gain in AP50 across scenes and 3% AP50 gain in motorway condition.

cs.CV↗

Federated Dynamic Sparse Training: Computing Less, Communicating Less, Yet Learning Better

Federated learning (FL) enables distribution of machine learning workloads from the cloud to resource-limited edge devices. Unfortunately, current deep networks remain not only too compute-heavy for inference and training on edge devices, but also too large for communicating updates over bandwidth-constrained networks. In this paper, we develop, implement, and experimentally validate a novel FL framework termed Federated Dynamic Sparse Training (FedDST) by which complex neural networks can be deployed and trained with substantially improved efficiency in both on-device computation and in-network communication. At the core of FedDST is a dynamic process that extracts and trains sparse sub-networks from the target full network. With this scheme, "two birds are killed with one stone:" instead of full models, each client performs efficient training of its own sparse networks, and only sparse networks are transmitted between devices and the cloud. Furthermore, our results reveal that the dynamic sparsity during FL training more flexibly accommodates local heterogeneity in FL agents than the fixed, shared sparse masks. Moreover, dynamic sparsity naturally introduces an "in-time self-ensembling effect" into the training dynamics and improves the FL performance even over dense training. In a realistic and challenging non i.i.d. FL setting, FedDST consistently outperforms competing algorithms in our experiments: for instance, at any fixed upload data cap on non-iid CIFAR-10, it gains an impressive accuracy advantage of 10% over FedAvgM when given the same upload data cap; the accuracy gap remains 3% even when FedAvgM is given 2x the upload data cap, further demonstrating efficacy of FedDST. Code is available at: https://github.com/bibikar/feddst.

cs.LG↗

Communication-Efficient Variance-Reduced Decentralized Stochastic Optimization over Time-Varying Directed Graphs

We consider the problem of decentralized optimization over time-varying directed networks. The network nodes can access only their local objectives, and aim to collaboratively minimize a global function by exchanging messages with their neighbors. Leveraging sparsification, gradient tracking and variance-reduction, we propose a novel communication-efficient decentralized optimization scheme that is suitable for resource-constrained time-varying directed networks. We prove that in the case of smooth and strongly-convex objective functions, the proposed scheme achieves an accelerated linear convergence rate. To our knowledge, this is the first decentralized optimization framework for time-varying directed networks that achieves such a convergence rate and applies to settings requiring sparsified communication. Experimental results on both synthetic and real datasets verify the theoretical results and demonstrate efficacy of the proposed scheme.

eess.SY↗

Towards Accelerated Greedy Sampling and Reconstruction of Bandlimited Graph Signals

We study the problem of sampling and reconstructing spectrally sparse graph signals where the objective is to select a subset of nodes of prespecified cardinality that ensures interpolation of the original signal with the lowest possible reconstruction error. This task is of critical importance in Graph signal processing (GSP) and while existing methods generally provide satisfactory performance, they typically entail a prohibitive computational cost when it comes to the study of large-scale problems. Thus, there is a need for accelerated and efficient methods tailored for high-dimensional and large-scale sampling and reconstruction tasks. To this end, we first consider a non-Bayesian scenario and propose an efficient iterative node sampling procedure that in the noiseless case enables exact recovery of the original signal from the set of selected nodes. In the case of noisy measurements, a bound on the reconstruction error of the proposed algorithm is established. Then, we consider the Bayesian scenario where we formulate the sampling task as the problem of maximizing a monotone weak submodular function, and propose a randomized-greedy algorithm to find a sub-optimal subset of informative nodes. We derive worst-case performance guarantees on the mean-square error achieved by the randomized-greedy algorithm for general non-stationary graph signals.

eess.SP↗

Performance-Complexity Tradeoffs in Greedy Weak Submodular Maximization with Random Sampling

Many problems in signal processing and machine learning can be formalized as weak submodular optimization tasks. For such problems, a simple greedy algorithm (\textsc{Greedy}) is guaranteed to find a solution achieving the objective with a value no worse than $1-e^{-1/c}$ of the optimal, where $c$ is the multiplicative weak-submodularity constant. Due to the high cost of querying large-scale systems, the complexity of \textsc{Greedy} becomes prohibitive in contemporary applications. In this work, we study the tradeoff between performance and complexity when one resorts to random sampling strategies to reduce the query complexity of \textsc{Greedy}. Specifically, we quantify the effect of uniform sampling strategies on \textsc{Greedy}'s performance through two metrics: (i) probability of identifying an optimal subset, and (ii) suboptimality with respect to the optimal solution. The latter implies that uniform sampling strategies with a fixed sampling size achieve a non-trivial approximation factor; however, we show that with overwhelming probability, these methods fail to find the optimal subset. Our analysis shows that the failure of uniform sampling strategies with fixed sample size can be circumvented by successively increasing the size of the search space. Building upon this insight, we propose a simple progressive stochastic greedy algorithm and study its approximation guarantees. Moreover, we demonstrate effectiveness of the proposed method in dimensionality reduction applications and feature selection tasks for clustering and object tracking.

cs.DM↗

Decentralized Optimization On Time-Varying Directed Graphs Under Communication Constraints

We consider the problem of decentralized optimization where a collection of agents, each having access to a local cost function, communicate over a time-varying directed network and aim to minimize the sum of those functions. In practice, the amount of information that can be exchanged between the agents is limited due to communication constraints. We propose a communication-efficient algorithm for decentralized convex optimization that rely on sparsification of local updates exchanged between neighboring agents in the network. In directed networks, message sparsification alters column-stochasticity -- a property that plays an important role in establishing convergence of decentralized learning tasks. We propose a decentralized optimization scheme that relies on local modification of mixing matrices, and show that it achieves $\mathcal{O}(\frac{\mathrm{ln}T}{\sqrt{T}})$ convergence rate in the considered settings. Experiments validate theoretical results and demonstrate efficacy of the proposed algorithm.

eess.SY↗

Opportunistic Federated Learning: An Exploration of Egocentric Collaboration for Pervasive Computing Applications

Pervasive computing applications commonly involve user's personal smartphones collecting data to influence application behavior. Applications are often backed by models that learn from the user's experiences to provide personalized and responsive behavior. While models are often pre-trained on massive datasets, federated learning has gained attention for its ability to train globally shared models on users' private data without requiring the users to share their data directly. However, federated learning requires devices to collaborate via a central server, under the assumption that all users desire to learn the same model. We define a new approach, opportunistic federated learning, in which individual devices belonging to different users seek to learn robust models that are personalized to their user's own experiences. However, instead of learning in isolation, these models opportunistically incorporate the learned experiences of other devices they encounter opportunistically. In this paper, we explore the feasibility and limits of such an approach, culminating in a framework that supports encounter-based pairwise collaborative learning. The use of our opportunistic encounter-based learning amplifies the performance of personalized learning while resisting overfitting to encountered data.

cs.LG↗

On the Benefits of Multiple Gossip Steps in Communication-Constrained Decentralized Optimization

In decentralized optimization, it is common algorithmic practice to have nodes interleave (local) gradient descent iterations with gossip (i.e. averaging over the network) steps. Motivated by the training of large-scale machine learning models, it is also increasingly common to require that messages be {\em lossy compressed} versions of the local parameters. In this paper, we show that, in such compressed decentralized optimization settings, there are benefits to having {\em multiple} gossip steps between subsequent gradient iterations, even when the cost of doing so is appropriately accounted for e.g. by means of reducing the precision of compressed information. In particular, we show that having $O(\log\frac{1}ε)$ gradient iterations {with constant step size} - and $O(\log\frac{1}ε)$ gossip steps between every pair of these iterations - enables convergence to within $ε$ of the optimal value for smooth non-convex objectives satisfying Polyak-Łojasiewicz condition. This result also holds for smooth strongly convex objectives. To our knowledge, this is the first work that derives convergence results for nonconvex optimization under arbitrary communication compression.

cs.LG↗

Real-Time Radio Technology and Modulation Classification via an LSTM Auto-Encoder

Identification of the type of communication technology and/or modulation scheme based on detected radio signal are challenging problems encountered in a variety of applications including spectrum allocation and radio interference mitigation. They are rendered difficult due to a growing number of emitter types and varied effects of real-world channels upon the radio signal. Existing spectrum monitoring techniques are capable of acquiring massive amounts of radio and real-time spectrum data using compact sensors deployed in a variety of settings. However, state-of-the-art methods that use such data to classify emitter types and detect communication schemes struggle to achieve required levels of accuracy at a computational efficiency that would allow their implementation on low-cost computational platforms. In this paper, we present a learning framework based on an LSTM denoising auto-encoder designed to automatically extract stable and robust features from noisy radio signals, and infer modulation or technology type using the learned features. The algorithm utilizes a compact neural network architecture readily implemented on a low-cost computational platform while exceeding state-of-the-art accuracy. Results on realistic synthetic as well as over-the-air radio data demonstrate that the proposed framework reliably and efficiently classifies received radio signals, often demonstrating superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.

eess.SP↗