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FedMD: Heterogenous Federated Learning via Model Distillation

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arxiv 1910.03581 v1 pith:MK64VU4S submitted 2019-10-08 cs.LG stat.ML

FedMD: Heterogenous Federated Learning via Model Distillation

classification cs.LG stat.ML
keywords learningmodelfederateddataparticipantsdatasetdistillationenables
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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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.

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Cited by 23 Pith papers

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