BlockFLow: An Accountable and Privacy-Preserving Solution for Federated Learning

Abstract: Federated learning enables the development of a machine learning model among collaborating agents without requiring them to share their underlying data. However, malicious agents who train on random data, or worse, on datasets with the result classes inverted, can weaken the combined model. BlockFLow is an accountable federated learning system that is fully decentralized and privacy-preserving. Its primary goal is to reward agents proportional to the quality of their contribution while protecting the privacy of the underlying datasets and being resilient to malicious adversaries. Specifically, BlockFLow incorporates differential privacy, introduces a novel auditing mechanism for model contribution, and uses Ethereum smart contracts to incentivize good behavior. Unlike existing auditing and accountability methods for federated learning systems, our system does not require a centralized test dataset, sharing of datasets between the agents, or one or more trusted auditors; it is fully decentralized and resilient up to a 50% collusion attack in a malicious trust model. When run on the public Ethereum blockchain, BlockFLow uses the results from the audit to reward parties with cryptocurrency based on the quality of their contribution. We evaluated BlockFLow on two datasets that offer classification tasks solvable via logistic regression models. Our results show that the resultant auditing scores reflect the quality of the honest agents' datasets. Moreover, the scores from dishonest agents are statistically lower than those from the honest agents. These results, along with the reasonable blockchain costs, demonstrate the effectiveness of BlockFLow as an accountable federated learning system.

Vaikkunth Mugunthan
Ravi Rahman
Lalana Kagal


Coded Computing for Federated Learning at the Edge

Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) is an exciting new paradigm that enables training a global model from data generated locally at the client nodes, without moving client data to a centralized server. Performance of FL in a multi-access edge computing (MEC) network suffers from slow convergence due to heterogeneity and stochastic fluctuations in compute power and communication link qualities across clients. A recent work, Coded Federated Learning (CFL), proposes to mitigate stragglers and speed up training for linear regression tasks by assigning redundant computations at the MEC server. Coding redundancy in CFL is computed by exploiting statistical properties of compute and communication delays. We develop CodedFedL that addresses the difficult task of extending CFL to distributed non-linear regression and classification problems with multioutput labels. The key innovation of our work is to exploit distributed kernel embedding using random Fourier features that transforms the training task into distributed linear regression. We provide an analytical solution for load allocation, and demonstrate significant performance gains for CodedFedL through experiments over benchmark datasets using practical network parameters.

Saurav Prakash
Sagar Dhakal
Mustafa Akdeniz
A. Salman Avestimehr
Nageen Himayat


Privacy Threats Against Federated Matrix Factorization

Abstract: Matrix Factorization has been very successful in practical recommendation applications and e-commerce. Due to data shortage and stringent regulations, it can be hard to collect sufficient data to build performant recommender systems for a single company. Federated learning provides the possibility to bridge the data silos and build machine learning models without compromising privacy and security. Participants sharing common users or items collaboratively build a model over data from all the participants. There have been some works exploring the application of federated learning to recommender systems and the privacy issues in collaborative filtering systems. However, the privacy threats in federated matrix factorization are not studied. In this paper, we categorize federated matrix factorization into three types based on the partition of feature space and analyze privacy threats against each type of federated matrix factorization model. We also discuss privacy-preserving approaches. As far as we are aware, this is the first study of privacy threats of the matrix factorization method in the federated learning framework.

Dashan Gao
Ben Tan
Ce Ju
Vincent W. Zheng
Qiang Yang


Harnessing Wireless Channels for Scalable and Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning

Abstract: Wireless connectivity is instrumental in enabling scalable federated learning (FL), yet wireless channels bring challenges for model training, in which channel randomness perturbs each worker's model update while multiple workers' updates incur significant interference under limited bandwidth. To address these challenges, in this work we formulate a novel constrained optimization problem, and propose an FL framework harnessing wireless channel perturbations and interference for improving privacy, bandwidth-efficiency, and scalability. The resultant algorithm is coined analog federated ADMM (A-FADMM) based on analog transmissions and the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). In A-FADMM, all workers upload their model updates to the parameter server (PS) using a single channel via analog transmissions, during which all models are perturbed and aggregated over-the-air. This not only saves communication bandwidth, but also hides each worker's exact model update trajectory from any eavesdropper including the honest-but-curious PS, thereby preserving data privacy against model inversion attacks. We formally prove the convergence and privacy guarantees of A-FADMM for convex functions under time-varying channels, and numerically show the effectiveness of A-FADMM under noisy channels and stochastic non-convex functions, in terms of convergence speed and scalability, as well as communication bandwidth and energy efficiency.

Anis Elgabli
Jihong Park
Chaouki Ben Issaid
Mehdi Bennis


Federated Learning and Differential Privacy: Software tools analysis, the Sherpa.ai FL framework and methodological guidelines for preserving data privacy

Abstract: The high demand of artificial intelligence services at the edges that also preserve data privacy has pushed the research on novel machine learning paradigms that fit those requirements. Federated learning has the ambition to protect data privacy through distributed learning methods that keep the data in their data silos. Likewise, differential privacy attains to improve the protection of data privacy by measuring the privacy loss in the communication among the elements of federated learning. The prospective matching of federated learning and differential privacy to the challenges of data privacy protection has caused the release of several software tools that support their functionalities, but they lack of the needed unified vision for those techniques, and a methodological workflow that support their use. Hence, we present the Sherpa.ai Federated Learning framework that is built upon an holistic view of federated learning and differential privacy. It results from the study of how to adapt the machine learning paradigm to federated learning, and the definition of methodological guidelines for developing artificial intelligence services based on federated learning and differential privacy. We show how to follow the methodological guidelines with the Sherpa.ai Federated Learning framework by means of a classification and a regression use cases.

Nuria Rodríguez-Barroso
Goran Stipcich
Daniel Jiménez-López
José Antonio Ruiz-Millán
Eugenio Martínez-Cámara
Gerardo González-Seco
M. Victoria Luzón
Miguel Ángel Veganzones
Francisco Herrera


Federated Semi-Supervised Learning with Inter-Client Consistency & Disjoint Learning

Abstract: While existing federated learning approaches mostly require that clients have fully-labeled data to train on, in realistic settings, data obtained at the client-side often comes without any accompanying labels. Such deficiency of labels may result from either high labeling cost, or difficulty of annotation due to the requirement of expert knowledge. Thus the private data at each client may be either partly labeled, or completely unlabeled with labeled data being available only at the server, which leads us to a new practical federated learning problem, namely Federated Semi-Supervised Learning (FSSL). In this work, we study two essential scenarios of FSSL based on the location of the labeled data. The first scenario considers a conventional case where clients have both labeled and unlabeled data (labels-at-client), and the second scenario considers a more challenging case, where the labeled data is only available at the server (labels-at-server). We then propose a novel method to tackle the problems, which we refer to as Federated Matching (FedMatch). FedMatch improves upon naive combinations of federated learning and semi-supervised learning approaches with a new inter-client consistency loss and decomposition of the parameters for disjoint learning on labeled and unlabeled data. Through extensive experimental validation of our method in the two different scenarios, we show that our method outperforms both local semi-supervised learning and baselines which naively combine federated learning with semi-supervised learning. The code is available at https://github.com/wyjeong/FedMatch.

Wonyong Jeong
Jaehong Yoon
Eunho Yang
Sung Ju Hwang

International Conference on Learning Representations


Federated Survival Analysis with Discrete-Time Cox Models

Abstract: Building machine learning models from decentralized datasets located in different centers with federated learning (FL) is a promising approach to circumvent local data scarcity while preserving privacy. However, the prominent Cox proportional hazards (PH) model, used for survival analysis, does not fit the FL framework, as its loss function is non-separable with respect to the samples. The naïve method to bypass this non-separability consists in calculating the losses per center, and minimizing their sum as an approximation of the true loss. We show that the resulting model may suffer from important performance loss in some adverse settings. Instead, we leverage the discrete-time extension of the Cox PH model to formulate survival analysis as a classification problem with a separable loss function. Using this approach, we train survival models using standard FL techniques on synthetic data, as well as real-world datasets from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), showing similar performance to a Cox PH model trained on aggregated data. Compared to previous works, the proposed method is more communication-efficient, more generic, and more amenable to using privacy-preserving techniques.

Mathieu Andreux
Andre Manoel
Romuald Menuet
Charlie Saillard
Chloé Simpson


Robust Federated Learning: The Case of Affine Distribution Shifts

Abstract: Federated learning is a distributed paradigm that aims at training models using samples distributed across multiple users in a network while keeping the samples on users' devices with the aim of efficiency and protecting users privacy. In such settings, the training data is often statistically heterogeneous and manifests various distribution shifts across users, which degrades the performance of the learnt model. The primary goal of this paper is to develop a robust federated learning algorithm that achieves satisfactory performance against distribution shifts in users' samples. To achieve this goal, we first consider a structured affine distribution shift in users' data that captures the device-dependent data heterogeneity in federated settings. This perturbation model is applicable to various federated learning problems such as image classification where the images undergo device-dependent imperfections, e.g. different intensity, contrast, and brightness. To address affine distribution shifts across users, we propose a Federated Learning framework Robust to Affine distribution shifts (FLRA) that is provably robust against affine Wasserstein shifts to the distribution of observed samples. To solve the FLRA's distributed minimax problem, we propose a fast and efficient optimization method and provide convergence guarantees via a gradient Descent Ascent (GDA) method. We further prove generalization error bounds for the learnt classifier to show proper generalization from empirical distribution of samples to the true underlying distribution. We perform several numerical experiments to empirically support FLRA. We show that an affine distribution shift indeed suffices to significantly decrease the performance of the learnt classifier in a new test user, and our proposed algorithm achieves a significant gain in comparison to standard federated learning and adversarial training methods.

Amirhossein Reisizadeh
Farzan Farnia
Ramtin Pedarsani
Ali Jadbabaie


Privacy-Preserving Technology to Help Millions of People: Federated Prediction Model for Stroke Prevention

Abstract: Prevention of stroke with its associated risk factors has been one of the public health priorities worldwide. Emerging artificial intelligence technology is being increasingly adopted to predict stroke. Because of privacy concerns, patient data are stored in distributed electronic health record (EHR) databases, voluminous clinical datasets, which prevent patient data from being aggregated and restrains AI technology to boost the accuracy of stroke prediction with centralized training data. In this work, our scientists and engineers propose a privacy-preserving scheme to predict the risk of stroke and deploy our federated prediction model on cloud servers. Our system of federated prediction model asynchronously supports any number of client connections and arbitrary local gradient iterations in each communication round. It adopts federated averaging during the model training process, without patient data being taken out of the hospitals during the whole process of model training and forecasting. With the privacy-preserving mechanism, our federated prediction model trains over all the healthcare data from hospitals in a certain city without actual data sharing among them. Therefore, it is not only secure but also more accurate than any single prediction model that trains over the data only from one single hospital. Especially for small hospitals with few confirmed stroke cases, our federated model boosts model performance by 10%~20% in several machine learning metrics. To help stroke experts comprehend the advantage of our prediction system more intuitively, we developed a mobile app that collects the key information of patients' statistics and demonstrates performance comparisons between the federated prediction model and the single prediction model during the federated training process.

Ce Ju
Ruihui Zhao
Jichao Sun
Xiguang Wei
Bo Zhao
Yang Liu
Hongshan Li
Tianjian Chen
Xinwei Zhang
Dashan Gao
Ben Tan
Han Yu
Chuning He
Yuan Jin


Backdoor Attacks on Federated Meta-Learning

Abstract: Federated learning allows multiple users to collaboratively train a shared classification model while preserving data privacy. This approach, where model updates are aggregated by a central server, was shown to be vulnerable to poisoning backdoor attacks: a malicious user can alter the shared model to arbitrarily classify specific inputs from a given class. In this paper, we analyze the effects of backdoor attacks on federated meta-learning, where users train a model that can be adapted to different sets of output classes using only a few examples. While the ability to adapt could, in principle, make federated learning frameworks more robust to backdoor attacks (when new training examples are benign), we find that even 1-shot~attacks can be very successful and persist after additional training. To address these vulnerabilities, we propose a defense mechanism inspired by matching networks, where the class of an input is predicted from the similarity of its features with a support set of labeled examples. By removing the decision logic from the model shared with the federation, success and persistence of backdoor attacks are greatly reduced.

Chien-Lun Chen
Leana Golubchik
Marco Paolieri


XOR Mixup: Privacy-Preserving Data Augmentation for One-Shot Federated Learning

Abstract: User-generated data distributions are often imbalanced across devices and labels, hampering the performance of federated learning (FL). To remedy to this non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) data problem, in this work we develop a privacy-preserving XOR based mixup data augmentation technique, coined XorMixup, and thereby propose a novel one-shot FL framework, termed XorMixFL. The core idea is to collect other devices' encoded data samples that are decoded only using each device's own data samples. The decoding provides synthetic-but-realistic samples until inducing an IID dataset, used for model training. Both encoding and decoding procedures follow the bit-wise XOR operations that intentionally distort raw samples, thereby preserving data privacy. Simulation results corroborate that XorMixFL achieves up to 17.6% higher accuracy than Vanilla FL under a non-IID MNIST dataset.

MyungJae Shin
Chihoon Hwang
Joongheon Kim
Jihong Park
Mehdi Bennis
Seong-Lyun Kim


LDP-Fed: Federated Learning with Local Differential Privacy

Abstract: This paper presents LDP-Fed, a novel federated learning system with a formal privacy guarantee using local differential privacy (LDP). Existing LDP protocols are developed primarily to ensure data privacy in the collection of single numerical or categorical values, such as click count in Web access logs. However, in federated learning model parameter updates are collected iteratively from each participant and consist of high dimensional, continuous values with high precision (10s of digits after the decimal point), making existing LDP protocols inapplicable. To address this challenge in LDP-Fed, we design and develop two novel approaches. First, LDP-Fed's LDP Module provides a formal differential privacy guarantee for the repeated collection of model training parameters in the federated training of large-scale neural networks over multiple individual participants' private datasets. Second, LDP-Fed implements a suite of selection and filtering techniques for perturbing and sharing select parameter updates with the parameter server. We validate our system deployed with a condensed LDP protocol in training deep neural networks on public data. We compare this version of LDP-Fed, coined CLDP-Fed, with other state-of-the-art approaches with respect to model accuracy, privacy preservation, and system capabilities.

Stacey Truex
Ling Liu
Ka-Ho Chow
Mehmet Emre Gursoy
Wenqi Wei


A Distributed Trust Framework for Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning

Abstract: When training a machine learning model, it is standard procedure for the researcher to have full knowledge of both the data and model. However, this engenders a lack of trust between data owners and data scientists. Data owners are justifiably reluctant to relinquish control of private information to third parties. Privacy-preserving techniques distribute computation in order to ensure that data remains in the control of the owner while learning takes place. However, architectures distributed amongst multiple agents introduce an entirely new set of security and trust complications. These include data poisoning and model theft. This paper outlines a distributed infrastructure which is used to facilitate peer-to-peer trust between distributed agents; collaboratively performing a privacy-preserving workflow. Our outlined prototype sets industry gatekeepers and governance bodies as credential issuers. Before participating in the distributed learning workflow, malicious actors must first negotiate valid credentials. We detail a proof of concept using Hyperledger Aries, Decentralised Identifiers (DIDs) and Verifiable Credentials (VCs) to establish a distributed trust architecture during a privacy-preserving machine learning experiment. Specifically, we utilise secure and authenticated DID communication channels in order to facilitate a federated learning workflow related to mental health care data.

Will Abramson
Adam James Hall
Pavlos Papadopoulos
Nikolaos Pitropakis
William J Buchanan


Scalable Privacy-Preserving Distributed Learning

Abstract: In this paper, we address the problem of privacy-preserving distributed learning and the evaluation of machine-learning models by analyzing it in the widespread MapReduce abstraction that we extend with privacy constraints. We design SPINDLE (Scalable Privacy-preservINg Distributed LEarning), the first distributed and privacy-preserving system that covers the complete ML workflow by enabling the execution of a cooperative gradient-descent and the evaluation of the obtained model and by preserving data and model confidentiality in a passive-adversary model with up to N-1 colluding parties. SPINDLE uses multiparty homomorphic encryption to execute parallel high-depth computations on encrypted data without significant overhead. We instantiate SPINDLE for the training and evaluation of generalized linear models on distributed datasets and show that it is able to accurately (on par with non-secure centrally-trained models) and efficiently (due to a multi-level parallelization of the computations) train models that require a high number of iterations on large input data with thousands of features, distributed among hundreds of data providers. For instance, it trains a logistic-regression model on a dataset of one million samples with 32 features distributed among 160 data providers in less than three minutes.

David Froelicher
Juan R. Troncoso-Pastoriza
Apostolos Pyrgelis
Sinem Sav
Joao Sa Sousa
Jean-Philippe Bossuat
Jean-Pierre Hubaux

Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies


Proxy Experience Replay: Federated Distillation for Distributed Reinforcement Learning

Abstract: Traditional distributed deep reinforcement learning (RL) commonly relies on exchanging the experience replay memory (RM) of each agent. Since the RM contains all state observations and action policy history, it may incur huge communication overhead while violating the privacy of each agent. Alternatively, this article presents a communication-efficient and privacy-preserving distributed RL framework, coined federated reinforcement distillation (FRD). In FRD, each agent exchanges its proxy experience replay memory (ProxRM), in which policies are locally averaged with respect to proxy states clustering actual states. To provide FRD design insights, we present ablation studies on the impact of ProxRM structures, neural network architectures, and communication intervals. Furthermore, we propose an improved version of FRD, coined mixup augmented FRD (MixFRD), in which ProxRM is interpolated using the mixup data augmentation algorithm. Simulations in a Cartpole environment validate the effectiveness of MixFRD in reducing the variance of mission completion time and communication cost, compared to the benchmark schemes, vanilla FRD, federated reinforcement learning (FRL), and policy distillation (PD).

Han Cha
Jihong Park
Hyesung Kim
Mehdi Bennis
Seong-Lyun Kim


Information-Theoretic Bounds on the Generalization Error and Privacy Leakage in Federated Learning

Abstract: Machine learning algorithms operating on mobile networks can be characterized into three different categories. First is the classical situation in which the end-user devices send their data to a central server where this data is used to train a model. Second is the distributed setting in which each device trains its own model and send its model parameters to a central server where these model parameters are aggregated to create one final model. Third is the federated learning setting in which, at any given time $t$, a certain number of active end users train with their own local data along with feedback provided by the central server and then send their newly estimated model parameters to the central server. The server, then, aggregates these new parameters, updates its own model, and feeds the updated parameters back to all the end users, continuing this process until it converges. The main objective of this work is to provide an information-theoretic framework for all of the aforementioned learning paradigms. Moreover, using the provided framework, we develop upper and lower bounds on the generalization error together with bounds on the privacy leakage in the classical, distributed and federated learning settings. Keywords: Federated Learning, Distributed Learning, Machine Learning, Model Aggregation.

International Workshop on Signal Processing Advances in Wireless Communications


Private Dataset Generation Using Privacy Preserving Collaborative Learning

Abstract: With increasing usage of deep learning algorithms in many application, new research questions related to privacy and adversarial attacks are emerging. However, the deep learning algorithm improvement needs more and more data to be shared within research community. Methodologies like federated learning, differential privacy, additive secret sharing provides a way to train machine learning models on edge without moving the data from the edge. However, it is very computationally intensive and prone to adversarial attacks. Therefore, this work introduces a privacy preserving FedCollabNN framework for training machine learning models at edge, which is computationally efficient and robust against adversarial attacks. The simulation results using MNIST dataset indicates the effectiveness of the framework.


Federated Transfer Learning for EEG Signal Classification

Abstract: The success of deep learning (DL) methods in the Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) field for classification of electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings has been restricted by the lack of large datasets. Privacy concerns associated with EEG signals limit the possibility of constructing a large EEG-BCI dataset by the conglomeration of multiple small ones for jointly training machine learning models. Hence, in this paper, we propose a novel privacy-preserving DL architecture named federated transfer learning (FTL) for EEG classification that is based on the federated learning framework. Working with the single-trial covariance matrix, the proposed architecture extracts common discriminative information from multi-subject EEG data with the help of domain adaptation techniques. We evaluate the performance of the proposed architecture on the PhysioNet dataset for 2-class motor imagery classification. While avoiding the actual data sharing, our FTL approach achieves 2% higher classification accuracy in a subject-adaptive analysis. Also, in the absence of multi-subject data, our architecture provides 6% better accuracy compared to other state-of-the-art DL architectures.

Ce Ju
Dashan Gao
Ravikiran Mane
Ben Tan
Yang Liu
Cuntai Guan

Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society


Privacy Preserving Distributed Machine Learning with Federated Learning

Abstract: Edge computing and distributed machine learning have advanced to a level that can revolutionize a particular organization. Distributed devices such as the Internet of Things (IoT) often produce a large amount of data, eventually resulting in big data that can be vital in uncovering hidden patterns, and other insights in numerous fields such as healthcare, banking, and policing. Data related to areas such as healthcare and banking can contain potentially sensitive data that can become public if they are not appropriately sanitized. Federated learning (FedML) is a recently developed distributed machine learning (DML) approach that tries to preserve privacy by bringing the learning of an ML model to data owners'. However, literature shows different attack methods such as membership inference that exploit the vulnerabilities of ML models as well as the coordinating servers to retrieve private data. Hence, FedML needs additional measures to guarantee data privacy. Furthermore, big data often requires more resources than available in a standard computer. This paper addresses these issues by proposing a distributed perturbation algorithm named as DISTPAB, for privacy preservation of horizontally partitioned data. DISTPAB alleviates computational bottlenecks by distributing the task of privacy preservation utilizing the asymmetry of resources of a distributed environment, which can have resource-constrained devices as well as high-performance computers. Experiments show that DISTPAB provides high accuracy, high efficiency, high scalability, and high attack resistance. Further experiments on privacy-preserving FedML show that DISTPAB is an excellent solution to stop privacy leaks in DML while preserving high data utility.

M. A. P. Chamikara
P. Bertok
I. Khalil
D. Liu
S. Camtepe


A Review of Privacy-preserving Federated Learning for the Internet-of-Things

Abstract: The Internet-of-Things (IoT) generates vast quantities of data, much of it attributable to individuals' activity and behaviour. Gathering personal data and performing machine learning tasks on this data in a central location presents a significant privacy risk to individuals as well as challenges with communicating this data to the cloud. However, analytics based on machine learning and in particular deep learning benefit greatly from large amounts of data to develop high-performance predictive models. This work reviews federated learning as an approach for performing machine learning on distributed data with the goal of protecting the privacy of user-generated data as well as reducing communication costs associated with data transfer. We survey a wide variety of papers covering communication-efficiency, client heterogeneity and privacy preserving methods that are crucial for federated learning in the context of the IoT. Throughout this review, we identify the strengths and weaknesses of different methods applied to federated learning and finally, we outline future directions for privacy preserving federated learning research, particularly focusing on IoT applications.

Christopher Briggs
Zhong Fan
Peter Andras


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

Abstract: 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.

Chaoyang He
Murali Annavaram
Salman Avestimehr


PrivFL: Practical Privacy-preserving Federated Regressions on High-dimensional Data over Mobile Networks

Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) enables a large number of users to jointly learn a shared machine learning (ML) model, coordinated by a centralized server, where the data is distributed across multiple devices. This approach enables the server or users to train and learn an ML model using gradient descent, while keeping all the training data on users' devices. We consider training an ML model over a mobile network where user dropout is a common phenomenon. Although federated learning was aimed at reducing data privacy risks, the ML model privacy has not received much attention. In this work, we present PrivFL, a privacy-preserving system for training (predictive) linear and logistic regression models and oblivious predictions in the federated setting, while guaranteeing data and model privacy as well as ensuring robustness to users dropping out in the network. We design two privacy-preserving protocols for training linear and logistic regression models based on an additive homomorphic encryption (HE) scheme and an aggregation protocol. Exploiting the training algorithm of federated learning, at the core of our training protocols is a secure multiparty global gradient computation on alive users' data. We analyze the security of our training protocols against semi-honest adversaries. As long as the aggregation protocol is secure under the aggregation privacy game and the additive HE scheme is semantically secure, PrivFL guarantees the users' data privacy against the server, and the server's regression model privacy against the users. We demonstrate the performance of PrivFL on real-world datasets and show its applicability in the federated learning system.


Concentrated Differentially Private and Utility Preserving Federated Learning

Abstract: Federated learning is a machine learning setting where a set of edge devices collaboratively train a model under the orchestration of a central server without sharing their local data. At each communication round of federated learning, edge devices perform multiple steps of stochastic gradient descent with their local data and then upload the computation results to the server for model update. During this process, the challenge of privacy leakage arises due to the information exchange between edge devices and the server when the server is not fully trusted. While some previous privacy-preserving mechanisms could readily be used for federated learning, they usually come at a high cost on convergence of the algorithm and utility of the learned model. In this paper, we develop a federated learning approach that addresses the privacy challenge without much degradation on model utility through a combination of local gradient perturbation, secure aggregation, and zero-concentrated differential privacy (zCDP). We provide a tight end-to-end privacy guarantee of our approach and analyze its theoretical convergence rates. Through extensive numerical experiments on real-world datasets, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method and show its superior trade-off between privacy and model utility.


Privacy-preserving Traffic Flow Prediction: A Federated Learning Approach

Abstract: Existing traffic flow forecasting approaches by deep learning models achieve excellent success based on a large volume of datasets gathered by governments and organizations. However, these datasets may contain lots of user's private data, which is challenging the current prediction approaches as user privacy is calling for the public concern in recent years. Therefore, how to develop accurate traffic prediction while preserving privacy is a significant problem to be solved, and there is a trade-off between these two objectives. To address this challenge, we introduce a privacy-preserving machine learning technique named federated learning and propose a Federated Learning-based Gated Recurrent Unit neural network algorithm (FedGRU) for traffic flow prediction. FedGRU differs from current centralized learning methods and updates universal learning models through a secure parameter aggregation mechanism rather than directly sharing raw data among organizations. In the secure parameter aggregation mechanism, we adopt a Federated Averaging algorithm to reduce the communication overhead during the model parameter transmission process. Furthermore, we design a Joint Announcement Protocol to improve the scalability of FedGRU. We also propose an ensemble clustering-based scheme for traffic flow prediction by grouping the organizations into clusters before applying FedGRU algorithm. Through extensive case studies on a real-world dataset, it is shown that FedGRU's prediction accuracy is 90.96% higher than the advanced deep learning models, which confirm that FedGRU can achieve accurate and timely traffic prediction without compromising the privacy and security of raw data.

Yi Liu
James J. Q. Yu
Jiawen Kang
Dusit Niyato
Shuyu Zhang


A Compressive Sensing Approach for Federated Learning over Massive MIMO Communication Systems

Abstract: Federated learning is a privacy-preserving approach to train a global model at a central server by collaborating with wireless devices, each with its own local training data set. In this paper, we present a compressive sensing approach for federated learning over massive multiple-input multiple-output communication systems in which the central server equipped with a massive antenna array communicates with the wireless devices. One major challenge in system design is to reconstruct local gradient vectors accurately at the central server, which are computed-and-sent from the wireless devices. To overcome this challenge, we first establish a transmission strategy to construct sparse transmitted signals from the local gradient vectors at the devices. We then propose a compressive sensing algorithm enabling the server to iteratively find the linear minimum-mean-square-error (LMMSE) estimate of the transmitted signal by exploiting its sparsity. We also derive an analytical threshold for the residual error at each iteration, to design the stopping criterion of the proposed algorithm. We show that for a sparse transmitted signal, the proposed algorithm requires less computationally complexity than LMMSE. Simulation results demonstrate that the presented approach outperforms conventional linear beamforming approaches and reduces the performance gap between federated learning and centralized learning with perfect reconstruction.

Yo-Seb Jeon
Mohammad Mohammadi Amiri
Jun Li
H. Vincent Poor


Differential Privacy at Risk: Bridging Randomness and Privacy Budget

Abstract: The calibration of noise for a privacy-preserving mechanism depends on the sensitivity of the query and the prescribed privacy level. A data steward must make the non-trivial choice of a privacy level that balances the requirements of users and the monetary constraints of the business entity. We analyse roles of the sources of randomness, namely the explicit randomness induced by the noise distribution and the implicit randomness induced by the data-generation distribution, that are involved in the design of a privacy-preserving mechanism. The finer analysis enables us to provide stronger privacy guarantees with quantifiable risks. Thus, we propose privacy at risk that is a probabilistic calibration of privacy-preserving mechanisms. We provide a composition theorem that leverages privacy at risk. We instantiate the probabilistic calibration for the Laplace mechanism by providing analytical results. We also propose a cost model that bridges the gap between the privacy level and the compensation budget estimated by a GDPR compliant business entity. The convexity of the proposed cost model leads to a unique fine-tuning of privacy level that minimises the compensation budget. We show its effectiveness by illustrating a realistic scenario that avoids overestimation of the compensation budget by using privacy at risk for the Laplace mechanism. We quantitatively show that composition using the cost optimal privacy at risk provides stronger privacy guarantee than the classical advanced composition.

Ashish Dandekar
Debabrota Basu
Stephane Bressan


User-Level Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning: Analysis and Performance Optimization

Abstract: Federated learning (FL), as a type of collaborative machine learning framework, is capable of preserving private data from mobile terminals (MTs) while training the data into useful models. Nevertheless, from a viewpoint of information theory, it is still possible for a curious server to infer private information from the shared models uploaded by MTs. To address this problem, we first make use of the concept of local differential privacy (LDP), and propose a user-level differential privacy (UDP) algorithm by adding artificial noise to the shared models before uploading them to servers. According to our analysis, the UDP framework can realize $(ε_{i}, δ_{i})$-LDP for the $i$-th MT with adjustable privacy protection levels by varying the variances of the artificial noise processes. We then derive a theoretical convergence upper-bound for the UDP algorithm. It reveals that there exists an optimal number of communication rounds to achieve the best learning performance. More importantly, we propose a communication rounds discounting (CRD) method. Compared with the heuristic search method, the proposed CRD method can achieve a much better trade-off between the computational complexity of searching and the convergence performance. Extensive experiments indicate that our UDP algorithm using the proposed CRD method can effectively improve both the training efficiency and model quality for the given privacy protection levels.

Kang Wei
Jun Li
Ming Ding
Chuan Ma
Hang Su
Bo Zhang
H. Vincent Poor


Anonymizing Data for Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning

Abstract: Federated learning enables training a global machine learning model from data distributed across multiple sites, without having to move the data. This is particularly relevant in healthcare applications, where data is rife with personal, highly-sensitive information, and data analysis methods must provably comply with regulatory guidelines. Although federated learning prevents sharing raw data, it is still possible to launch privacy attacks on the model parameters that are exposed during the training process, or on the generated machine learning model. In this paper, we propose the first syntactic approach for offering privacy in the context of federated learning. Unlike the state-of-the-art differential privacy-based frameworks, our approach aims to maximize utility or model performance, while supporting a defensible level of privacy, as demanded by GDPR and HIPAA. We perform a comprehensive empirical evaluation on two important problems in the healthcare domain, using real-world electronic health data of 1 million patients. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in achieving high model performance, while offering the desired level of privacy. Through comparative studies, we also show that, for varying datasets, experimental setups, and privacy budgets, our approach offers higher model performance than differential privacy-based techniques in federated learning.

Olivia Choudhury
Aris Gkoulalas-Divanis
Theodoros Salonidis
Issa Sylla
Yoonyoung Park
Grace Hsu
Amar Das


PrivacyFL: A simulator for privacy-preserving and secure federated learning

Abstract: Federated learning is a technique that enables distributed clients to collaboratively learn a shared machine learning model while keeping their training data localized. This reduces data privacy risks, however, privacy concerns still exist since it is possible to leak information about the training dataset from the trained model's weights or parameters. Setting up a federated learning environment, especially with security and privacy guarantees, is a time-consuming process with numerous configurations and parameters that can be manipulated. In order to help clients ensure that collaboration is feasible and to check that it improves their model accuracy, a real-world simulator for privacy-preserving and secure federated learning is required. In this paper, we introduce PrivacyFL, which is an extensible, easily configurable and scalable simulator for federated learning environments. Its key features include latency simulation, robustness to client departure, support for both centralized and decentralized learning, and configurable privacy and security mechanisms based on differential privacy and secure multiparty computation. In this paper, we motivate our research, describe the architecture of the simulator and associated protocols, and discuss its evaluation in numerous scenarios that highlight its wide range of functionality and its advantages. Our paper addresses a significant real-world problem: checking the feasibility of participating in a federated learning environment under a variety of circumstances. It also has a strong practical impact because organizations such as hospitals, banks, and research institutes, which have large amounts of sensitive data and would like to collaborate, would greatly benefit from having a system that enables them to do so in a privacy-preserving and secure manner.

Vaikkunth Mugunthan
Anton Peraire-Bueno
Lalana Kagal

International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management


Federated Extra-Trees with Privacy Preserving

Abstract: It is commonly observed that the data are scattered everywhere and difficult to be centralized. The data privacy and security also become a sensitive topic. The laws and regulations such as the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) are designed to protect the public's data privacy. However, machine learning requires a large amount of data for better performance, and the current circumstances put deploying real-life AI applications in an extremely difficult situation. To tackle these challenges, in this paper we propose a novel privacy-preserving federated machine learning model, named Federated Extra-Trees, which applies local differential privacy in the federated trees model. A secure multi-institutional machine learning system was developed to provide superior performance by processing the modeling jointly on different clients without exchanging any raw data. We have validated the accuracy of our work by conducting extensive experiments on public datasets and the efficiency and robustness were also verified by simulating the real-world scenarios. Overall, we presented an extensible, scalable and practical solution to handle the data island problem.

Yang Liu
Mingxin Chen
Wenxi Zhang
Junbo Zhang
Yu Zheng


Prophet: Proactive Candidate-Selection for Federated Learning by Predicting the Qualities of Training and Reporting Phases

Abstract: Although the challenge of the device connection is much relieved in 5G networks, the training latency is still an obstacle preventing Federated Learning (FL) from being largely adopted. One of the most fundamental problems that lead to large latency is the bad candidate-selection for FL. In the dynamic environment, the mobile devices selected by the existing reactive candidate-selection algorithms very possibly fail to complete the training and reporting phases of FL, because the FL parameter server only knows the currently-observed resources of all candidates. To this end, we study the proactive candidate-selection for FL in this paper. We first let each candidate device predict the qualities of both its training and reporting phases locally using LSTM. Then, the proposed candidateselection algorithm is implemented by the Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) framework. Finally, the real-world trace-driven experiments prove that the proposed approach outperforms the existing reactive algorithms

Huawei Huang
Kangying Lin
Song Guo
Pan Zhou
Zibin Zheng


A Federated Deep Learning Framework for Privacy Preservation and Communication Efficiency

Abstract: Deep learning has achieved great success in many applications. However, its deployment in practice has been hurdled by two issues: the privacy of data that has to be aggregated centrally for model training and high communication overhead due to transmission of a large amount of data usually geographically distributed. Addressing both issues is challenging and most existing works could not provide an efficient solution. In this paper, we develop FedPC, a Federated Deep Learning Framework for Privacy Preservation and Communication Efficiency. The framework allows a model to be learned on multiple private datasets while not revealing any information of training data, even with intermediate data. The framework also minimizes the amount of data exchanged to update the model. We formally prove the convergence of the learning model when training with FedPC and its privacy-preserving property. We perform extensive experiments to evaluate the performance of FedPC in terms of the approximation to the upper-bound performance (when training centrally) and communication overhead. The results show that FedPC maintains the performance approximation of the models within $8.5\%$ of the centrally-trained models when data is distributed to 10 computing nodes. FedPC also reduces the communication overhead by up to $42.20\%$ compared to existing works.

Tien-Dung Cao
Tram Truong-Huu
Hien Tran
Khanh Tran


Stratified cross-validation for unbiased and privacy-preserving federated learning

Abstract: Large-scale collections of electronic records constitute both an opportunity for the development of more accurate prediction models and a threat for privacy. To limit privacy exposure new privacy-enhancing techniques are emerging such as federated learning which enables large-scale data analysis while avoiding the centralization of records in a unique database that would represent a critical point of failure. Although promising regarding privacy protection, federated learning prevents using some data-cleaning algorithms thus inducing new biases. In this work we focus on the recurrent problem of duplicated records that, if not handled properly, may cause over-optimistic estimations of a model's performances. We introduce and discuss stratified cross-validation, a validation methodology that leverages stratification techniques to prevent data leakage in federated learning settings without relying on demanding deduplication algorithms.

R. Bey
R. Goussault
M. Benchoufi
R. Porcher


Multi-site fMRI Analysis Using Privacy-preserving Federated Learning and Domain Adaptation: ABIDE Results

Abstract: Deep learning models have shown their advantage in many different tasks, including neuroimage analysis. However, to effectively train a high-quality deep learning model, the aggregation of a significant amount of patient information is required. The time and cost for acquisition and annotation in assembling, for example, large fMRI datasets make it difficult to acquire large numbers at a single site. However, due to the need to protect the privacy of patient data, it is hard to assemble a central database from multiple institutions. Federated learning allows for population-level models to be trained without centralizing entities' data by transmitting the global model to local entities, training the model locally, and then averaging the gradients or weights in the global model. However, some studies suggest that private information can be recovered from the model gradients or weights. In this work, we address the problem of multi-site fMRI classification with a privacy-preserving strategy. To solve the problem, we propose a federated learning approach, where a decentralized iterative optimization algorithm is implemented and shared local model weights are altered by a randomization mechanism. Considering the systemic differences of fMRI distributions from different sites, we further propose two domain adaptation methods in this federated learning formulation. We investigate various practical aspects of federated model optimization and compare federated learning with alternative training strategies. Overall, our results demonstrate that it is promising to utilize multi-site data without data sharing to boost neuroimage analysis performance and find reliable disease-related biomarkers. Our proposed pipeline can be generalized to other privacy-sensitive medical data analysis problems.

Xiaoxiao Li
Yufeng Gu
Nicha Dvornek
Lawrence Staib
Pamela Ventola
James S. Duncan


Federated Learning for Localization: A Privacy-Preserving Crowdsourcing Method

Abstract: Received Signal Strength (RSS) fingerprint-based localization has attracted a lot of research effort and cultivated many commercial applications of location-based services due to its low cost and ease of implementation. Many studies are exploring the use of deep learning (DL) algorithms for localization. DL's ability to extract features and to classify autonomously makes it an attractive solution for fingerprint-based localization. These solutions require frequent retraining of DL models with vast amounts of measurements. Although crowdsourcing is an excellent way to gather immense amounts of data, it jeopardizes the privacy of participants, as it requires to collect labeled data at a centralized server. Recently, federated learning has emerged as a practical concept in solving the privacy preservation issue of crowdsourcing participants by performing model training at the edge devices in a decentralized manner; the participants do not expose their data anymore to a centralized server. This paper presents a novel method utilizing federated learning to improve the accuracy of RSS fingerprint-based localization while preserving the privacy of the crowdsourcing participants. Employing federated learning allows ensuring \emph{preserving the privacy of user data} while enabling an adequate localization performance with experimental data captured in real-world settings. The proposed method improved localization accuracy by 1.8 meters when used as a booster for centralized learning and achieved satisfactory localization accuracy when used standalone.

Bekir Sait Ciftler
Abdullatif Albaseer
Noureddine Lasla
Mohamed Abdallah


Think Locally, Act Globally: Federated Learning with Local and Global Representations

Abstract: Federated learning is a method of training models on private data distributed over multiple devices. To keep device data private, the global model is trained by only communicating parameters and updates which poses scalability challenges for large models. To this end, we propose a new federated learning algorithm that jointly learns compact local representations on each device and a global model across all devices. As a result, the global model can be smaller since it only operates on local representations, reducing the number of communicated parameters. Theoretically, we provide a generalization analysis which shows that a combination of local and global models reduces both variance in the data as well as variance across device distributions. Empirically, we demonstrate that local models enable communication-efficient training while retaining performance. We also evaluate on the task of personalized mood prediction from real-world mobile data where privacy is key. Finally, local models handle heterogeneous data from new devices, and learn fair representations that obfuscate protected attributes such as race, age, and gender.

Paul Pu Liang
Terrance Liu
Liu Ziyin
Nicholas B. Allen
Randy P. Auerbach
David Brent
Ruslan Salakhutdinov
Louis-Philippe Morency


Asynchronous Federated Learning with Differential Privacy for Edge Intelligence

Abstract: Federated learning has been showing as a promising approach in paving the last mile of artificial intelligence, due to its great potential of solving the data isolation problem in large scale machine learning. Particularly, with consideration of the heterogeneity in practical edge computing systems, asynchronous edge-cloud collaboration based federated learning can further improve the learning efficiency by significantly reducing the straggler effect. Despite no raw data sharing, the open architecture and extensive collaborations of asynchronous federated learning (AFL) still give some malicious participants great opportunities to infer other parties' training data, thus leading to serious concerns of privacy. To achieve a rigorous privacy guarantee with high utility, we investigate to secure asynchronous edge-cloud collaborative federated learning with differential privacy, focusing on the impacts of differential privacy on model convergence of AFL. Formally, we give the first analysis on the model convergence of AFL under DP and propose a multi-stage adjustable private algorithm (MAPA) to improve the trade-off between model utility and privacy by dynamically adjusting both the noise scale and the learning rate. Through extensive simulations and real-world experiments with an edge-could testbed, we demonstrate that MAPA significantly improves both the model accuracy and convergence speed with sufficient privacy guarantee.

Yanan Li
Shusen Yang
Xuebin Ren
Cong Zhao


Private Federated Learning with Domain Adaptation

Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) is a distributed machine learning (ML) paradigm that enables multiple parties to jointly re-train a shared model without sharing their data with any other parties, offering advantages in both scale and privacy. We propose a framework to augment this collaborative model-building with per-user domain adaptation. We show that this technique improves model accuracy for all users, using both real and synthetic data, and that this improvement is much more pronounced when differential privacy bounds are imposed on the FL model.

Daniel Peterson
Pallika Kanani
Virendra J. Marathe


HybridAlpha: An Efficient Approach for Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning

Abstract: Federated learning has emerged as a promising approach for collaborative and privacy-preserving learning. Participants in a federated learning process cooperatively train a model by exchanging model parameters instead of the actual training data, which they might want to keep private. However, parameter interaction and the resulting model still might disclose information about the training data used. To address these privacy concerns, several approaches have been proposed based on differential privacy and secure multiparty computation (SMC), among others. They often result in large communication overhead and slow training time. In this paper, we propose HybridAlpha, an approach for privacy-preserving federated learning employing an SMC protocol based on functional encryption. This protocol is simple, efficient and resilient to participants dropping out. We evaluate our approach regarding the training time and data volume exchanged using a federated learning process to train a CNN on the MNIST data set. Evaluation against existing crypto-based SMC solutions shows that HybridAlpha can reduce the training time by 68% and data transfer volume by 92% on average while providing the same model performance and privacy guarantees as the existing solutions.

Runhua Xu
Nathalie Baracaldo
Yi Zhou
Ali Anwar
Heiko Ludwig


Privacy-Preserving Blockchain Based Federated Learning with Differential Data Sharing

Abstract: For the modern world where data is becoming one of the most valuable assets, robust data privacy policies rooted in the fundamental infrastructure of networks and applications are becoming an even bigger necessity to secure sensitive user data. In due course with the ever-evolving nature of newer statistical techniques infringing user privacy, machine learning models with algorithms built with respect for user privacy can offer a dynamically adaptive solution to preserve user privacy against the exponentially increasing multidimensional relationships that datasets create. Using these privacy aware ML Models at the core of a Federated Learning Ecosystem can enable the entire network to learn from data in a decentralized manner. By harnessing the ever-increasing computational power of mobile devices, increasing network reliability and IoT devices revolutionizing the smart devices industry, and combining it with a secure and scalable, global learning session backed by a blockchain network with the ability to ensure on-device privacy, we allow any Internet enabled device to participate and contribute data to a global privacy preserving, data sharing network with blockchain technology even allowing the network to reward quality work. This network architecture can also be built on top of existing blockchain networks like Ethereum and Hyperledger, this lets even small startups build enterprise ready decentralized solutions allowing anyone to learn from data across different departments of a company, all the way to thousands of devices participating in a global synchronized learning network.


Differentially Private Federated Variational Inference

Abstract: In many real-world applications of machine learning, data are distributed across many clients and cannot leave the devices they are stored on. Furthermore, each client's data, computational resources and communication constraints may be very different. This setting is known as federated learning, in which privacy is a key concern. Differential privacy is commonly used to provide mathematical privacy guarantees. This work, to the best of our knowledge, is the first to consider federated, differentially private, Bayesian learning. We build on Partitioned Variational Inference (PVI) which was recently developed to support approximate Bayesian inference in the federated setting. We modify the client-side optimisation of PVI to provide an ($ε$, $δ$)-DP guarantee. We show that it is possible to learn moderately private logistic regression models in the federated setting that achieve similar performance to models trained non-privately on centralised data.

Mrinank Sharma
Michael Hutchinson
Siddharth Swaroop
Antti Honkela
Richard E. Turner


Parallel Distributed Logistic Regression for Vertical Federated Learning without Third-Party Coordinator

Abstract: Federated Learning is a new distributed learning mechanism which allows model training on a large corpus of decentralized data owned by different data providers, without sharing or leakage of raw data. According to the characteristics of data dis-tribution, it could be usually classified into three categories: horizontal federated learning, vertical federated learning, and federated transfer learning. In this paper we present a solution for parallel dis-tributed logistic regression for vertical federated learning. As compared with existing works, the role of third-party coordinator is removed in our proposed solution. The system is built on the pa-rameter server architecture and aims to speed up the model training via utilizing a cluster of servers in case of large volume of training data. We also evaluate the performance of the parallel distributed model training and the experimental results show the great scalability of the system.

Shengwen Yang
Bing Ren
Xuhui Zhou
Liping Liu


Federated Learning with Bayesian Differential Privacy

Abstract: We consider the problem of reinforcing federated learning with formal privacy guarantees. We propose to employ Bayesian differential privacy, a relaxation of differential privacy for similarly distributed data, to provide sharper privacy loss bounds. We adapt the Bayesian privacy accounting method to the federated setting and suggest multiple improvements for more efficient privacy budgeting at different levels. Our experiments show significant advantage over the state-of-the-art differential privacy bounds for federated learning on image classification tasks, including a medical application, bringing the privacy budget below 1 at the client level, and below 0.1 at the instance level. Lower amounts of noise also benefit the model accuracy and reduce the number of communication rounds.


Can You Really Backdoor Federated Learning?

Abstract: The decentralized nature of federated learning makes detecting and defending against adversarial attacks a challenging task. This paper focuses on backdoor attacks in the federated learning setting, where the goal of the adversary is to reduce the performance of the model on targeted tasks while maintaining good performance on the main task. Unlike existing works, we allow non-malicious clients to have correctly labeled samples from the targeted tasks. We conduct a comprehensive study of backdoor attacks and defenses for the EMNIST dataset, a real-life, user-partitioned, and non-iid dataset. We observe that in the absence of defenses, the performance of the attack largely depends on the fraction of adversaries present and the "complexity'' of the targeted task. Moreover, we show that norm clipping and "weak'' differential privacy mitigate the attacks without hurting the overall performance. We have implemented the attacks and defenses in TensorFlow Federated (TFF), a TensorFlow framework for federated learning. In open-sourcing our code, our goal is to encourage researchers to contribute new attacks and defenses and evaluate them on standard federated datasets.

Ziteng Sun
Peter Kairouz
Ananda Theertha Suresh
H. Brendan McMahan


Federated and Differentially Private Learning for Electronic Health Records

Abstract: The use of collaborative and decentralized machine learning techniques such as federated learning have the potential to enable the development and deployment of clinical risk predictions models in low-resource settings without requiring sensitive data be shared or stored in a central repository. This process necessitates communication of model weights or updates between collaborating entities, but it is unclear to what extent patient privacy is compromised as a result. To gain insight into this question, we study the efficacy of centralized versus federated learning in both private and non-private settings. The clinical prediction tasks we consider are the prediction of prolonged length of stay and in-hospital mortality across thirty one hospitals in the eICU Collaborative Research Database. We find that while it is straightforward to apply differentially private stochastic gradient descent to achieve strong privacy bounds when training in a centralized setting, it is considerably more difficult to do so in the federated setting.

Stephen R. Pfohl
Andrew M. Dai
Katherine Heller


Privacy-Preserving Generalized Linear Models using Distributed Block Coordinate Descent

Abstract: Combining data from varied sources has considerable potential for knowledge discovery: collaborating data parties can mine data in an expanded feature space, allowing them to explore a larger range of scientific questions. However, data sharing among different parties is highly restricted by legal conditions, ethical concerns, and / or data volume. Fueled by these concerns, the fields of cryptography and distributed learning have made great progress towards privacy-preserving and distributed data mining. However, practical implementations have been hampered by the limited scope or computational complexity of these methods. In this paper, we greatly extend the range of analyses available for vertically partitioned data, i.e., data collected by separate parties with different features on the same subjects. To this end, we present a novel approach for privacy-preserving generalized linear models, a fundamental and powerful framework underlying many prediction and classification procedures. We base our method on a distributed block coordinate descent algorithm to obtain parameter estimates, and we develop an extension to compute accurate standard errors without additional communication cost. We critically evaluate the information transfer for semi-honest collaborators and show that our protocol is secure against data reconstruction. Through both simulated and real-world examples we illustrate the functionality of our proposed algorithm. Without leaking information, our method performs as well on vertically partitioned data as existing methods on combined data -- all within mere minutes of computation time. We conclude that our method is a viable approach for vertically partitioned data analysis with a wide range of real-world applications.

Erik-Jan van Kesteren
Chang Sun
Daniel L. Oberski
Michel Dumontier
Lianne Ippel


Enhancing the Privacy of Federated Learning with Sketching

Abstract: In response to growing concerns about user privacy, federated learning has emerged as a promising tool to train statistical models over networks of devices while keeping data localized. Federated learning methods run training tasks directly on user devices and do not share the raw user data with third parties. However, current methods still share model updates, which may contain private information (e.g., one's weight and height), during the training process. Existing efforts that aim to improve the privacy of federated learning make compromises in one or more of the following key areas: performance (particularly communication cost), accuracy, or privacy. To better optimize these trade-offs, we propose that \textit{sketching algorithms} have a unique advantage in that they can provide both privacy and performance benefits while maintaining accuracy. We evaluate the feasibility of sketching-based federated learning with a prototype on three representative learning models. Our initial findings show that it is possible to provide strong privacy guarantees for federated learning without sacrificing performance or accuracy. Our work highlights that there exists a fundamental connection between privacy and communication in distributed settings, and suggests important open problems surrounding the theoretical understanding, methodology, and system design of practical, private federated learning.

Zaoxing Liu
Tian Li
Virginia Smith
Vyas Sekar


Secure and Efficient Federated Transfer Learning

Abstract: Machine Learning models require a vast amount of data for accurate training. In reality, most data is scattered across different organizations and cannot be easily integrated under many legal and practical constraints. Federated Transfer Learning (FTL) was introduced in [1] to improve statistical models under a data federation that allow knowledge to be shared without compromising user privacy, and enable complementary knowledge to be transferred in the network. As a result, a target-domain party can build more flexible and powerful models by leveraging rich labels from a source-domain party. However, the excessive computational overhead of the security protocol involved in this model rendered it impractical. In this work, we aim towards enhancing the efficiency and security of existing models for practical collaborative training under a data federation by incorporating Secret Sharing (SS). In literature, only the semi-honest model for Federated Transfer Learning has been considered. In this paper, we improve upon the previous solution, and also allow malicious players who can arbitrarily deviate from the protocol in our FTL model. This is much stronger than the semi-honest model where we assume that parties follow the protocol precisely. We do so using the one of the practical MPC protocol called SPDZ, thus our model can be efficiently extended to any number of parties even in the case of a dishonest majority. In addition, the models evaluated in our setting significantly outperform the previous work, in terms of both runtime and communication cost. A single iteration in our model executes in 0.8 seconds for the semi-honest case and 1.4 seconds for the malicious case for 500 samples, as compared to 35 seconds taken by the previous implementation.

Shreya Sharma
Xing Chaoping
Yang Liu
Yan Kang


Federated Uncertainty-Aware Learning for Distributed Hospital EHR Data

Abstract: Recent works have shown that applying Machine Learning to Electronic Health Records (EHR) can strongly accelerate precision medicine. This requires developing models based on diverse EHR sources. Federated Learning (FL) has enabled predictive modeling using distributed training which lifted the need of sharing data and compromising privacy. Since models are distributed in FL, it is attractive to devise ensembles of Deep Neural Networks that also assess model uncertainty. We propose a new FL model called Federated Uncertainty-Aware Learning Algorithm (FUALA) that improves on Federated Averaging (FedAvg) in the context of EHR. FUALA embeds uncertainty information in two ways: It reduces the contribution of models with high uncertainty in the aggregated model. It also introduces model ensembling at prediction time by keeping the last layers of each hospital from the final round. In FUALA, the Federator (central node) sends at each round the average model to all hospitals as well as a randomly assigned hospital model update to estimate its generalization on that hospital own data. Each hospital sends back its model update as well a generalization estimation of the assigned model. At prediction time, the model outputs C predictions for each sample where C is the number of hospital models. The experimental analysis conducted on a cohort of 87K deliveries for the task of preterm-birth prediction showed that the proposed approach outperforms FedAvg when evaluated on out-of-distribution data. We illustrated how uncertainty could be measured using the proposed approach.

Sabri Boughorbel
Fethi Jarray
Neethu Venugopal
Shabir Moosa
Haithum Elhadi
Michel Makhlouf


Stochastic Channel-Based Federated Learning for Medical Data Privacy Preserving

Abstract: Artificial neural network has achieved unprecedented success in the medical domain. This success depends on the availability of massive and representative datasets. However, data collection is often prevented by privacy concerns and people want to take control over their sensitive information during both training and using processes. To address this problem, we propose a privacy-preserving method for the distributed system, Stochastic Channel-Based Federated Learning (SCBF), which enables the participants to train a high-performance model cooperatively without sharing their inputs. Specifically, we design, implement and evaluate a channel-based update algorithm for the central server in a distributed system, which selects the channels with regard to the most active features in a training loop and uploads them as learned information from local datasets. A pruning process is applied to the algorithm based on the validation set, which serves as a model accelerator. In the experiment, our model presents better performances and higher saturating speed than the Federated Averaging method which reveals all the parameters of local models to the server when updating. We also demonstrate that the saturating rate of performance could be promoted by introducing a pruning process. And further improvement could be achieved by tuning the pruning rate. Our experiment shows that 57% of the time is saved by the pruning process with only a reduction of 0.0047 in AUCROC performance and a reduction of 0.0068 in AUCPR.


Abnormal Client Behavior Detection in Federated Learning

Abstract: In federated learning systems, clients are autonomous in that their behaviors are not fully governed by the server. Consequently, a client may intentionally or unintentionally deviate from the prescribed course of federated model training, resulting in abnormal behaviors, such as turning into a malicious attacker or a malfunctioning client. Timely detecting those anomalous clients is therefore critical to minimize their adverse impacts. In this work, we propose to detect anomalous clients at the server side. In particular, we generate low-dimensional surrogates of model weight vectors and use them to perform anomaly detection. We evaluate our solution through experiments on image classification model training over the FEMNIST dataset. Experimental results show that the proposed detection-based approach significantly outperforms the conventional defense-based methods.

Suyi Li
Yong Cheng
Yang Liu
Wei Wang
Tianjian Chen


Federated Generative Privacy

Abstract: In this paper, we propose FedGP, a framework for privacy-preserving data release in the federated learning setting. We use generative adversarial networks, generator components of which are trained by FedAvg algorithm, to draw privacy-preserving artificial data samples and empirically assess the risk of information disclosure. Our experiments show that FedGP is able to generate labelled data of high quality to successfully train and validate supervised models. Finally, we demonstrate that our approach significantly reduces vulnerability of such models to model inversion attacks.


Federated Learning with Unbiased Gradient Aggregation and Controllable Meta Updating

Abstract: Federated learning (FL) aims to train machine learning models in the decentralized system consisting of an enormous amount of smart edge devices. Federated averaging (FedAvg), the fundamental algorithm in FL settings, proposes on-device training and model aggregation to avoid the potential heavy communication costs and privacy concerns brought by transmitting raw data. However, through theoretical analysis we argue that 1) the multiple steps of local updating will result in gradient biases and 2) there is an inconsistency between the expected target distribution and the optimization objectives following the training paradigm in FedAvg. To tackle these problems, we first propose an unbiased gradient aggregation algorithm with the keep-trace gradient descent and the gradient evaluation strategy. Then we introduce an additional controllable meta updating procedure with a small set of data samples, indicating the expected target distribution, to provide a clear and consistent optimization objective. Both the two improvements are model- and task-agnostic and can be applied individually or together. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed methods are faster in convergence and achieve higher accuracy with different network architectures in various FL settings.

Xin Yao
Tianchi Huang
Rui-Xiao Zhang
Ruiyu Li
Lifeng Sun


Privacy-preserving Federated Bayesian Learning of a Generative Model for Imbalanced Classification of Clinical Data

Abstract: In clinical research, the lack of events of interest often necessitates imbalanced learning. One approach to resolve this obstacle is data integration or sharing, but due to privacy concerns neither is practical. Therefore, there is an increasing demand for a platform on which an analysis can be performed in a federated environment while maintaining privacy. However, it is quite challenging to develop a federated learning algorithm that can address both privacy-preserving and class imbalanced issues. In this study, we introduce a federated generative model learning platform for generating samples in a data-distributed environment while preserving privacy. We specifically propose approximate Bayesian computation-based Gaussian Mixture Model called 'Federated ABC-GMM', which can oversample data in a minor class by estimating the posterior distribution of model parameters across institutions in a privacy-preserving manner. PhysioNet2012, a dataset for prediction of mortality of patients in an Intensive Care Unit (ICU), was used to verify the performance of the proposed method. Experimental results show that our method boosts classification performance in terms of F1 score up to nearly an ideal situation. It is believed that the proposed method can be a novel alternative to solving class imbalance problems.


Overcoming Forgetting in Federated Learning on Non-IID Data

Abstract: We tackle the problem of Federated Learning in the non i.i.d. case, in which local models drift apart, inhibiting learning. Building on an analogy with Lifelong Learning, we adapt a solution for catastrophic forgetting to Federated Learning. We add a penalty term to the loss function, compelling all local models to converge to a shared optimum. We show that this can be done efficiently for communication (adding no further privacy risks), scaling with the number of nodes in the distributed setting. Our experiments show that this method is superior to competing ones for image recognition on the MNIST dataset.

Neta Shoham
Tomer Avidor
Aviv Keren
Nadav Israel
Daniel Benditkis
Liron Mor-Yosef
Itai Zeitak


Real-World Image Datasets for Federated Learning

Abstract: Federated learning is a new machine learning paradigm which allows data parties to build machine learning models collaboratively while keeping their data secure and private. While research efforts on federated learning have been growing tremendously in the past two years, most existing works still depend on pre-existing public datasets and artificial partitions to simulate data federations due to the lack of high-quality labeled data generated from real-world edge applications. Consequently, advances on benchmark and model evaluations for federated learning have been lagging behind. In this paper, we introduce a real-world image dataset. The dataset contains more than 900 images generated from 26 street cameras and 7 object categories annotated with detailed bounding box. The data distribution is non-IID and unbalanced, reflecting the characteristic real-world federated learning scenarios. Based on this dataset, we implemented two mainstream object detection algorithms (YOLO and Faster R-CNN) and provided an extensive benchmark on model performance, efficiency, and communication in a federated learning setting. Both the dataset and algorithms are made publicly available.

Jiahuan Luo
Xueyang Wu
Yun Luo
Anbu Huang
Yunfeng Huang
Yang Liu
Qiang Yang


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

Abstract: 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.

Chaoyang He
Conghui Tan
Hanlin Tang
Shuang Qiu
Ji Liu


FedMD: Heterogenous Federated Learning via Model Distillation

Abstract: Federated learning enables the creation of a powerful centralized model without compromising data privacy of multiple participants. While successful, it does not incorporate the case where each participant independently designs its own model. Due to intellectual property concerns and heterogeneous nature of tasks and data, this is a widespread requirement in applications of federated learning to areas such as health care and AI as a service. In this work, we use transfer learning and knowledge distillation to develop a universal framework that enables federated learning when each agent owns not only their private data, but also uniquely designed models. We test our framework on the MNIST/FEMNIST dataset and the CIFAR10/CIFAR100 dataset and observe fast improvement across all participating models. With 10 distinct participants, the final test accuracy of each model on average receives a 20% gain on top of what's possible without collaboration and is only a few percent lower than the performance each model would have obtained if all private datasets were pooled and made directly available for all participants.


Differential Privacy-enabled Federated Learning for Sensitive Health Data

Abstract: Leveraging real-world health data for machine learning tasks requires addressing many practical challenges, such as distributed data silos, privacy concerns with creating a centralized database from person-specific sensitive data, resource constraints for transferring and integrating data from multiple sites, and risk of a single point of failure. In this paper, we introduce a federated learning framework that can learn a global model from distributed health data held locally at different sites. The framework offers two levels of privacy protection. First, it does not move or share raw data across sites or with a centralized server during the model training process. Second, it uses a differential privacy mechanism to further protect the model from potential privacy attacks. We perform a comprehensive evaluation of our approach on two healthcare applications, using real-world electronic health data of 1 million patients. We demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the federated learning framework in offering an elevated level of privacy and maintaining utility of the global model.

Olivia Choudhury
Aris Gkoulalas-Divanis
Theodoros Salonidis
Issa Sylla
Yoonyoung Park
Grace Hsu
Amar Das


Clustered Federated Learning: Model-Agnostic Distributed Multi-Task Optimization under Privacy Constraints

Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) is currently the most widely adopted framework for collaborative training of (deep) machine learning models under privacy constraints. Albeit it's popularity, it has been observed that Federated Learning yields suboptimal results if the local clients' data distributions diverge. To address this issue, we present Clustered Federated Learning (CFL), a novel Federated Multi-Task Learning (FMTL) framework, which exploits geometric properties of the FL loss surface, to group the client population into clusters with jointly trainable data distributions. In contrast to existing FMTL approaches, CFL does not require any modifications to the FL communication protocol to be made, is applicable to general non-convex objectives (in particular deep neural networks) and comes with strong mathematical guarantees on the clustering quality. CFL is flexible enough to handle client populations that vary over time and can be implemented in a privacy preserving way. As clustering is only performed after Federated Learning has converged to a stationary point, CFL can be viewed as a post-processing method that will always achieve greater or equal performance than conventional FL by allowing clients to arrive at more specialized models. We verify our theoretical analysis in experiments with deep convolutional and recurrent neural networks on commonly used Federated Learning datasets.

Felix Sattler
Klaus-Robert Müller
Wojciech Samek

IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems


Privacy Preserving Stochastic Channel-Based Federated Learning with Neural Network Pruning

Abstract: Artificial neural network has achieved unprecedented success in a wide variety of domains such as classifying, predicting and recognizing objects. This success depends on the availability of big data since the training process requires massive and representative data sets. However, data collection is often prevented by privacy concerns and people want to take control over their sensitive information during both training and using processes. To address this problem, we propose a privacy-preserving method for the distributed system, Stochastic Channel-Based Federated Learning (SCBF), which enables the participants to train a high-performance model cooperatively without sharing their inputs. We design, implement and evaluate a channel-based update algorithm for the central server in a distributed system, which selects the channels with regard to the most active features in a training loop and uploads them as learned information from local datasets. A pruning process is applied to the algorithm based on the validation set, which serves as a model accelerator. In the experiment, our model presents equal performances and higher saturating speed than the Federated Averaging method which reveals all the parameters of local models to the server when updating. We also demonstrate that the converging rates could be increased by introducing a pruning process.


Alleviating Privacy Attacks via Causal Learning

Abstract: Machine learning models, especially deep neural networks have been shown to be susceptible to privacy attacks such as membership inference where an adversary can detect whether a data point was used for training a black-box model. Such privacy risks are exacerbated when a model's predictions are used on an unseen data distribution. To alleviate privacy attacks, we demonstrate the benefit of predictive models that are based on the causal relationships between input features and the outcome. We first show that models learnt using causal structure generalize better to unseen data, especially on data from different distributions than the train distribution. Based on this generalization property, we establish a theoretical link between causality and privacy: compared to associational models, causal models provide stronger differential privacy guarantees and are more robust to membership inference attacks. Experiments on simulated Bayesian networks and the colored-MNIST dataset show that associational models exhibit upto 80% attack accuracy under different test distributions and sample sizes whereas causal models exhibit attack accuracy close to a random guess.

International Conference on Machine Learning


HHHFL: Hierarchical Heterogeneous Horizontal Federated Learning for Electroencephalography

Abstract: Electroencephalography (EEG) classification techniques have been widely studied for human behavior and emotion recognition tasks. But it is still a challenging issue since the data may vary from subject to subject, may change over time for the same subject, and maybe heterogeneous. Recent years, increasing privacy-preserving demands poses new challenges to this task. The data heterogeneity, as well as the privacy constraint of the EEG data, is not concerned in previous studies. To fill this gap, in this paper, we propose a heterogeneous federated learning approach to train machine learning models over heterogeneous EEG data, while preserving the data privacy of each party. To verify the effectiveness of our approach, we conduct experiments on a real-world EEG dataset, consisting of heterogeneous data collected from diverse devices. Our approach achieves consistent performance improvement on every task.

Dashan Gao
Ce Ju
Xiguang Wei
Yang Liu
Tianjian Chen
Qiang Yang


Adversary-resilient Distributed and Decentralized Statistical Inference and Machine Learning: An Overview of Recent Advances Under the Byzantine Threat Model

Abstract: While the last few decades have witnessed a huge body of work devoted to inference and learning in distributed and decentralized setups, much of this work assumes a non-adversarial setting in which individual nodes---apart from occasional statistical failures---operate as intended within the algorithmic framework. In recent years, however, cybersecurity threats from malicious non-state actors and rogue entities have forced practitioners and researchers to rethink the robustness of distributed and decentralized algorithms against adversarial attacks. As a result, we now have a plethora of algorithmic approaches that guarantee robustness of distributed and/or decentralized inference and learning under different adversarial threat models. Driven in part by the world's growing appetite for data-driven decision making, however, securing of distributed/decentralized frameworks for inference and learning against adversarial threats remains a rapidly evolving research area. In this article, we provide an overview of some of the most recent developments in this area under the threat model of Byzantine attacks.

Zhixiong Yang
Arpita Gang
Waheed U. Bajwa

Mathematics
Computer Science
Engineering


Decentralized Federated Learning: A Segmented Gossip Approach

Abstract: The emerging concern about data privacy and security has motivated the proposal of federated learning, which allows nodes to only synchronize the locally-trained models instead their own original data. Conventional federated learning architecture, inherited from the parameter server design, relies on highly centralized topologies and the assumption of large nodes-to-server bandwidths. However, in real-world federated learning scenarios the network capacities between nodes are highly uniformly distributed and smaller than that in a datacenter. It is of great challenges for conventional federated learning approaches to efficiently utilize network capacities between nodes. In this paper, we propose a model segment level decentralized federated learning to tackle this problem. In particular, we propose a segmented gossip approach, which not only makes full utilization of node-to-node bandwidth, but also has good training convergence. The experimental results show that even the training time can be highly reduced as compared to centralized federated learning.


Emotionless: Privacy-Preserving Speech Analysis for Voice Assistants

Abstract: Voice-enabled interactions provide more human-like experiences in many popular IoT systems. Cloud-based speech analysis services extract useful information from voice input using speech recognition techniques. The voice signal is a rich resource that discloses several possible states of a speaker, such as emotional state, confidence and stress levels, physical condition, age, gender, and personal traits. Service providers can build a very accurate profile of a user's demographic category, personal preferences, and may compromise privacy. To address this problem, a privacy-preserving intermediate layer between users and cloud services is proposed to sanitize the voice input. It aims to maintain utility while preserving user privacy. It achieves this by collecting real time speech data and analyzes the signal to ensure privacy protection prior to sharing of this data with services providers. Precisely, the sensitive representations are extracted from the raw signal by using transformation functions and then wrapped it via voice conversion technology. Experimental evaluation based on emotion recognition to assess the efficacy of the proposed method shows that identification of sensitive emotional state of the speaker is reduced by ~96 %.

Computer Science
Engineering
Mathematics


Privacy-preserving Distributed Machine Learning via Local Randomization and ADMM Perturbation

Abstract: With the proliferation of training data, distributed machine learning (DML) is becoming more competent for large-scale learning tasks. However, privacy concerns have to be given priority in DML, since training data may contain sensitive information of users. In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving ADMM-based DML framework with two novel features: First, we remove the assumption commonly made in the literature that the users trust the server collecting their data. Second, the framework provides heterogeneous privacy for users depending on data's sensitive levels and servers' trust degrees. The challenging issue is to keep the accumulation of privacy losses over ADMM iterations minimal. In the proposed framework, a local randomization approach, which is differentially private, is adopted to provide users with self-controlled privacy guarantee for the most sensitive information. Further, the ADMM algorithm is perturbed through a combined noise-adding method, which simultaneously preserves privacy for users' less sensitive information and strengthens the privacy protection of the most sensitive information. We provide detailed analyses on the performance of the trained model according to its generalization error. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments using real-world datasets to validate the theoretical results and evaluate the classification performance of the proposed framework.

Xin Wang
Hideaki Ishii
Linkang Du
Peng Cheng
Jiming Chen


A Survey on Federated Learning Systems: Vision, Hype and Reality for Data Privacy and Protection

Abstract: Federated learning has been a hot research topic in enabling the collaborative training of machine learning models among different organizations under the privacy restrictions. As researchers try to support more machine learning models with different privacy-preserving approaches, there is a requirement in developing systems and infrastructures to ease the development of various federated learning algorithms. Similar to deep learning systems such as PyTorch and TensorFlow that boost the development of deep learning, federated learning systems (FLSs) are equivalently important, and face challenges from various aspects such as effectiveness, efficiency, and privacy. In this survey, we conduct a comprehensive review on federated learning systems. To achieve smooth flow and guide future research, we introduce the definition of federated learning systems and analyze the system components. Moreover, we provide a thorough categorization for federated learning systems according to six different aspects, including data distribution, machine learning model, privacy mechanism, communication architecture, scale of federation and motivation of federation. The categorization can help the design of federated learning systems as shown in our case studies. By systematically summarizing the existing federated learning systems, we present the design factors, case studies, and future research opportunities.

Qinbin Li
Zeyi Wen
Zhaomin Wu
Sixu Hu
Naibo Wang
Yuan Li
Xu Liu
Bingsheng He

IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering


FedHealth: A Federated Transfer Learning Framework for Wearable Healthcare

Abstract: With the rapid development of computing technology, wearable devices such as smart phones and wristbands make it easy to get access to people's health information including activities, sleep, sports, etc. Smart healthcare achieves great success by training machine learning models on a large quantity of user data. However, there are two critical challenges. Firstly, user data often exists in the form of isolated islands, making it difficult to perform aggregation without compromising privacy security. Secondly, the models trained on the cloud fail on personalization. In this paper, we propose FedHealth, the first federated transfer learning framework for wearable healthcare to tackle these challenges. FedHealth performs data aggregation through federated learning, and then builds personalized models by transfer learning. It is able to achieve accurate and personalized healthcare without compromising privacy and security. Experiments demonstrate that FedHealth produces higher accuracy (5.3% improvement) for wearable activity recognition when compared to traditional methods. FedHealth is general and extensible and has the potential to be used in many healthcare applications.

Yiqiang Chen
Jindong Wang
Chaohui Yu
Wen Gao
Xin Qin