Mobile Edge Computing and Artificial Intelligence: A Mutually-Beneficial Relationship

This article provides an overview of mobile edge computing (MEC) and artificial intelligence (AI) and discusses the mutually-beneficial relationship between them. AI provides revolutionary solutions in nearly every important aspect of the MEC offloading process, such as resource management and scheduling. On the other hand, MEC servers are utilized to avail a distributed and parallelized learning framework, namely mobile edge learning.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures, IEEE ComSoc Technical Committees Newslette

Federated Learning and Wireless Communications

Federated learning becomes increasingly attractive in the areas of wireless communications and machine learning due to its powerful functions and potential applications. In contrast to other machine learning tools that require no communication resources, federated learning exploits communications between the central server and the distributed local clients to train and optimize a machine learning model. Therefore, how to efficiently assign limited communication resources to train a federated learning model becomes critical to performance optimization. On the other hand, federated learning, as a brand new tool, can potentially enhance the intelligence of wireless networks. In this article, we provide a comprehensive overview on the relationship between federated learning and wireless communications, including basic principle of federated learning, efficient communications for training a federated learning model, and federated learning for intelligent wireless applications. We also identify some future research challenges and directions at the end of this article

Adaptive Task Allocation for Asynchronous Federated and Parallelized Mobile Edge Learning

This paper proposes a scheme to efficiently execute distributed learning tasks in an asynchronous manner while minimizing the gradient staleness on wireless edge nodes with heterogeneous computing and communication capacities. The approach considered in this paper ensures that all devices work for a certain duration that covers the time for data/model distribution, learning iterations, model collection and global aggregation. The resulting problem is an integer non-convex program with quadratic equality constraints as well as linear equality and inequality constraints. Because the problem is NP-hard, we relax the integer constraints in order to solve it efficiently with available solvers. Analytical bounds are derived using the KKT conditions and Lagrangian analysis in conjunction with the suggest-and-improve approach. Results show that our approach reduces the gradient staleness and can offer better accuracy than the synchronous scheme and the asynchronous scheme with equal task allocation.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, submitted to IEEE TVT as a correspondence paper (conference paper), 3 Appendice

Overcoming Forgetting in Federated Learning on Non-IID Data

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.Comment: Accepted to NeurIPS 2019 Workshop on Federated Learning for Data Privacy and Confidentialit

LEAF: A Benchmark for Federated Settings

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

E-Tree Learning: A Novel Decentralized Model Learning Framework for Edge AI

Traditionally, AI models are trained on the central cloud with data collected from end devices. This leads to high communication cost, long response time and privacy concerns. Recently Edge empowered AI, namely Edge AI, has been proposed to support AI model learning and deployment at the network edge closer to the data sources. Existing research including federated learning adopts a centralized architecture for model learning where a central server aggregates the model updates from the clients/workers. The centralized architecture has drawbacks such as performance bottleneck, poor scalability and single point of failure. In this paper, we propose a novel decentralized model learning approach, namely E-Tree, which makes use of a well-designed tree structure imposed on the edge devices. The tree structure and the locations and orders of aggregation on the tree are optimally designed to improve the training convergency and model accuracy. In particular, we design an efficient device clustering algorithm, named by KMA, for E-Tree by taking into account the data distribution on the devices as well as the the network distance. Evaluation results show E-Tree significantly outperforms the benchmark approaches such as federated learning and Gossip learning under NonIID data in terms of model accuracy and convergency.Comment: IEEE Internet of Things Journal, 202

Differential Privacy-enabled Federated Learning for Sensitive Health Data

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.Comment: Machine Learning for Health (ML4H) at NeurIPS 201

Federated Neuromorphic Learning of Spiking Neural Networks for Low-Power Edge Intelligence

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer a promising alternative to conventional Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) for the implementation of on-device low-power online learning and inference. On-device training is, however, constrained by the limited amount of data available at each device. In this paper, we propose to mitigate this problem via cooperative training through Federated Learning (FL). To this end, we introduce an online FL-based learning rule for networked on-device SNNs, which we refer to as FL-SNN. FL-SNN leverages local feedback signals within each SNN, in lieu of backpropagation, and global feedback through communication via a base station. The scheme demonstrates significant advantages over separate training and features a flexible trade-off between communication load and accuracy via the selective exchange of synaptic weights.Comment: submitted for conference publicatio

Age-Based Scheduling Policy for Federated Learning in Mobile Edge Networks

Federated learning (FL) is a machine learning model that preserves data privacy in the training process. Specifically, FL brings the model directly to the user equipments (UEs) for local training, where an edge server periodically collects the trained parameters to produce an improved model and sends it back to the UEs. However, since communication usually occurs through a limited spectrum, only a portion of the UEs can update their parameters upon each global aggregation. As such, new scheduling algorithms have to be engineered to facilitate the full implementation of FL. In this paper, based on a metric termed the age of update (AoU), we propose a scheduling policy by jointly accounting for the staleness of the received parameters and the instantaneous channel qualities to improve the running efficiency of FL. The proposed algorithm has low complexity and its effectiveness is demonstrated by Monte Carol simulations

D2D-Enabled Data Sharing for Distributed Machine Learning at Wireless Network Edge

Mobile edge learning is an emerging technique that enables distributed edge devices to collaborate in training shared machine learning models by exploiting their local data samples and communication and computation resources. To deal with the straggler dilemma issue faced in this technique, this paper proposes a new device to device enabled data sharing approach, in which different edge devices share their data samples among each other over communication links, in order to properly adjust their computation loads for increasing the training speed. Under this setup, we optimize the radio resource allocation for both data sharing and distributed training, with the objective of minimizing the total training delay under fixed numbers of local and global iterations. Numerical results show that the proposed data sharing design significantly reduces the training delay, and also enhances the training accuracy when the data samples are non independent and identically distributed among edge devices.Comment: Submit to IEEE Wireless Communications Letter