Xin Gan

Weiming Zhuang, Xin Gan, Yonggang Wen et al.

The increasingly stringent data privacy regulations limit the development of person re-identification (ReID) because person ReID training requires centralizing an enormous amount of data that contains sensitive personal information. To address this problem, we introduce federated person re-identification (FedReID) -- implementing federated learning, an emerging distributed training method, to person ReID. FedReID preserves data privacy by aggregating model updates, instead of raw data, from clients to a central server. Furthermore, we optimize the performance of FedReID under statistical heterogeneity via benchmark analysis. We first construct a benchmark with an enhanced algorithm, two architectures, and nine person ReID datasets with large variances to simulate the real-world statistical heterogeneity. The benchmark results present insights and bottlenecks of FedReID under statistical heterogeneity, including challenges in convergence and poor performance on datasets with large volumes. Based on these insights, we propose three optimization approaches: (1) We adopt knowledge distillation to facilitate the convergence of FedReID by better transferring knowledge from clients to the server; (2) We introduce client clustering to improve the performance of large datasets by aggregating clients with similar data distributions; (3) We propose cosine distance weight to elevate performance by dynamically updating the weights for aggregation depending on how well models are trained in clients. Extensive experiments demonstrate that these approaches achieve satisfying convergence with much better performance on all datasets. We believe that FedReID will shed light on implementing and optimizing federated learning on more computer vision applications.

Yunhao Ge, Sami Abu-El-Haija, Gan Xin et al.

Visual cognition of primates is superior to that of artificial neural networks in its ability to 'envision' a visual object, even a newly-introduced one, in different attributes including pose, position, color, texture, etc. To aid neural networks to envision objects with different attributes, we propose a family of objective functions, expressed on groups of examples, as a novel learning framework that we term Group-Supervised Learning (GSL). GSL allows us to decompose inputs into a disentangled representation with swappable components, that can be recombined to synthesize new samples. For instance, images of red boats & blue cars can be decomposed and recombined to synthesize novel images of red cars. We propose an implementation based on auto-encoder, termed group-supervised zero-shot synthesis network (GZS-Net) trained with our learning framework, that can produce a high-quality red car even if no such example is witnessed during training. We test our model and learning framework on existing benchmarks, in addition to anew dataset that we open-source. We qualitatively and quantitatively demonstrate that GZS-Net trained with GSL outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Weiming Zhuang, Xin Gan, Yonggang Wen et al.

Unsupervised representation learning has achieved outstanding performances using centralized data available on the Internet. However, the increasing awareness of privacy protection limits sharing of decentralized unlabeled image data that grows explosively in multiple parties (e.g., mobile phones and cameras). As such, a natural problem is how to leverage these data to learn visual representations for downstream tasks while preserving data privacy. To address this problem, we propose a novel federated unsupervised learning framework, FedU. In this framework, each party trains models from unlabeled data independently using contrastive learning with an online network and a target network. Then, a central server aggregates trained models and updates clients' models with the aggregated model. It preserves data privacy as each party only has access to its raw data. Decentralized data among multiple parties are normally non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID), leading to performance degradation. To tackle this challenge, we propose two simple but effective methods: 1) We design the communication protocol to upload only the encoders of online networks for server aggregation and update them with the aggregated encoder; 2) We introduce a new module to dynamically decide how to update predictors based on the divergence caused by non-IID. The predictor is the other component of the online network. Extensive experiments and ablations demonstrate the effectiveness and significance of FedU. It outperforms training with only one party by over 5% and other methods by over 14% in linear and semi-supervised evaluation on non-IID data.

Weiming Zhuang, Xin Gan, Yonggang Wen et al.

Unsupervised domain adaptation has been widely adopted to generalize models for unlabeled data in a target domain, given labeled data in a source domain, whose data distributions differ from the target domain. However, existing works are inapplicable to face recognition under privacy constraints because they require sharing sensitive face images between two domains. To address this problem, we propose a novel unsupervised federated face recognition approach (FedFR). FedFR improves the performance in the target domain by iteratively aggregating knowledge from the source domain through federated learning. It protects data privacy by transferring models instead of raw data between domains. Besides, we propose a new domain constraint loss (DCL) to regularize source domain training. DCL suppresses the data volume dominance of the source domain. We also enhance a hierarchical clustering algorithm to predict pseudo labels for the unlabeled target domain accurately. To this end, FedFR forms an end-to-end training pipeline: (1) pre-train in the source domain; (2) predict pseudo labels by clustering in the target domain; (3) conduct domain-constrained federated learning across two domains. Extensive experiments and analysis on two newly constructed benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of FedFR. It outperforms the baseline and classic methods in the target domain by over 4% on the more realistic benchmark. We believe that FedFR will shed light on applying federated learning to more computer vision tasks under privacy constraints.

Weiming Zhuang, Xin Gan, Yonggang Wen et al.

Academia and industry have developed several platforms to support the popular privacy-preserving distributed learning method -- Federated Learning (FL). However, these platforms are complex to use and require a deep understanding of FL, which imposes high barriers to entry for beginners, limits the productivity of researchers, and compromises deployment efficiency. In this paper, we propose the first low-code FL platform, EasyFL, to enable users with various levels of expertise to experiment and prototype FL applications with little coding. We achieve this goal while ensuring great flexibility and extensibility for customization by unifying simple API design, modular design, and granular training flow abstraction. With only a few lines of code, EasyFL empowers them with many out-of-the-box functionalities to accelerate experimentation and deployment. These practical functionalities are heterogeneity simulation, comprehensive tracking, distributed training optimization, and seamless deployment. They are proposed based on challenges identified in the proposed FL life cycle. Compared with other platforms, EasyFL not only requires just three lines of code (at least 10x lesser) to build a vanilla FL application but also incurs lower training overhead. Besides, our evaluations demonstrate that EasyFL expedites distributed training by 1.5x. It also improves the efficiency of deployment. We believe that EasyFL will increase the productivity of researchers and democratize FL to wider audiences.