LEAF: A Benchmark for Federated Settings
This provides a standardized benchmark for researchers in federated learning, meta-learning, and multi-task learning, though it is incremental as it builds on existing benchmarking efforts.
The authors tackled the lack of realistic benchmarks for federated learning by proposing LEAF, a modular framework that includes datasets, evaluation tools, and reference implementations to address challenges in federated settings.
Modern federated networks, such as those comprised of wearable devices, mobile phones, or autonomous vehicles, generate massive amounts of data each day. This wealth of data can help to learn models that can improve the user experience on each device. However, the scale and heterogeneity of federated data presents new challenges in research areas such as federated learning, meta-learning, and multi-task learning. As the machine learning community begins to tackle these challenges, we are at a critical time to ensure that developments made in these areas are grounded with realistic benchmarks. To this end, we propose LEAF, a modular benchmarking framework for learning in federated settings. LEAF includes a suite of open-source federated datasets, a rigorous evaluation framework, and a set of reference implementations, all geared towards capturing the obstacles and intricacies of practical federated environments.