Jonathan Scott

Jonathan Scott, Hossein Zakerinia, Christoph H. Lampert

We present PeFLL, a new personalized federated learning algorithm that improves over the state-of-the-art in three aspects: 1) it produces more accurate models, especially in the low-data regime, and not only for clients present during its training phase, but also for any that may emerge in the future; 2) it reduces the amount of on-client computation and client-server communication by providing future clients with ready-to-use personalized models that require no additional finetuning or optimization; 3) it comes with theoretical guarantees that establish generalization from the observed clients to future ones. At the core of PeFLL lies a learning-to-learn approach that jointly trains an embedding network and a hypernetwork. The embedding network is used to represent clients in a latent descriptor space in a way that reflects their similarity to each other. The hypernetwork takes as input such descriptors and outputs the parameters of fully personalized client models. In combination, both networks constitute a learning algorithm that achieves state-of-the-art performance in several personalized federated learning benchmarks.

Jonathan Scott, Michelle Yeo, Christoph H. Lampert

We present Cross-Client Label Propagation(XCLP), a new method for transductive federated learning. XCLP estimates a data graph jointly from the data of multiple clients and computes labels for the unlabeled data by propagating label information across the graph. To avoid clients having to share their data with anyone, XCLP employs two cryptographically secure protocols: secure Hamming distance computation and secure summation. We demonstrate two distinct applications of XCLP within federated learning. In the first, we use it in a one-shot way to predict labels for unseen test points. In the second, we use it to repeatedly pseudo-label unlabeled training data in a federated semi-supervised setting. Experiments on both real federated and standard benchmark datasets show that in both applications XCLP achieves higher classification accuracy than alternative approaches.

Jonathan Scott, Christoph H. Lampert, David Saulpic

Clustering is a cornerstone of data analysis that is particularly suited to identifying coherent subgroups or substructures in unlabeled data, as are generated continuously in large amounts these days. However, in many cases traditional clustering methods are not applicable, because data are increasingly being produced and stored in a distributed way, e.g. on edge devices, and privacy concerns prevent it from being transferred to a central server. To address this challenge, we present FedDP-KMeans, a new algorithm for $k$-means clustering that is fully-federated as well as differentially private. Our approach leverages (potentially small and out-of-distribution) server-side data to overcome the primary challenge of differentially private clustering methods: the need for a good initialization. Combining our initialization with a simple federated DP-Lloyds algorithm we obtain an algorithm that achieves excellent results on synthetic and real-world benchmark tasks. We also provide a theoretical analysis of our method that provides bounds on the convergence speed and cluster identification success.

Hossein Zakerinia, Jonathan Scott, Christoph H. Lampert

Personalized federated learning has emerged as a popular approach to training on devices holding statistically heterogeneous data, known as clients. However, most existing approaches require a client to have labeled data for training or finetuning in order to obtain their own personalized model. In this paper we address this by proposing FLowDUP, a novel method that is able to generate a personalized model using only a forward pass with unlabeled data. The generated model parameters reside in a low-dimensional subspace, enabling efficient communication and computation. FLowDUP's learning objective is theoretically motivated by our new transductive multi-task PAC-Bayesian generalization bound, that provides performance guarantees for unlabeled clients. The objective is structured in such a way that it allows both clients with labeled data and clients with only unlabeled data to contribute to the training process. To supplement our theoretical results we carry out a thorough experimental evaluation of FLowDUP, demonstrating strong empirical performance on a range of datasets with differing sorts of statistically heterogeneous clients. Through numerous ablation studies, we test the efficacy of the individual components of the method.