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R. Zhu

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Addressing Heterogeneity in Multi-Device Federated Learning

Journal article (2024) - Ran Zhu, Mingkun Yang, Qing Wang
Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a privacy-preserving paradigm for collaborative deep learning model training across distributed data silos. Despite its importance, FL faces challenges such as high latency and less effective global models. In this paper, we propose ShuffleFL, an innovative framework stemming from the hierarchical FL, which introduces a user layer between the FL devices and the FL server. ShuffleFL naturally groups devices based on their affiliations, e.g., belonging to the same user, to ease the strict privacy restriction-"data at the FL devices cannot be shared with others", thereby enabling the exchange of local samples among them. The user layer assumes a multi-faceted role, not just aggregating local updates but also coordinating data shuffling within affiliated devices. We formulate this data shuffling as an optimization problem, detailing our objectives to align local data closely with device computing capabilities and to ensure a more balanced data distribution at the intra-user devices. Through extensive experiments using realistic device profiles and five non-IID datasets, we demonstrate that ShuffleFL can improve inference accuracy by 2.81% to 7.85% and speed up the convergence by 4.11x to 36.56x when reaching the target accuracy. ...
Journal article (2024) - Ran Zhu, Maxim Van Den Abeele, Jona Beysens, Jie Yang, Qing Wang
Visible light positioning (VLP) based on the received signal strength (RSS) can leverage a dense deployment of LEDs in future lighting infrastructure to provide accurate and energy-efficient indoor positioning. However, its positioning accuracy heavily depends on the density of collected fingerprints, which is labor-intensive. In this work, we propose a data pre-processing method, including data cleaning and data augmentation, to construct reliable and dense fingerprint samples, thereby alleviating the impact of noisy samples as well as reducing labor intensity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method achieves an average positioning error of 1.7 cm, utilizing a sparse dataset that reduces the fingerprint collection effort by 98 percent. Running a tinyML-based model for VLP on the Arduino Nano microcontroller, we also show the possibilities for deploying RSS fingerprint-based VLP systems on resource-constrained embedded devices for real-world applications. ...

Client-transparent utility estimation for robust federated learning

Federated Learning (FL) is an important privacy-preserving learning paradigm that plays an important role in the Intelligent Internet of Things. Training a global model in FL, however, is vulnerable to the data noise across the clients. In this paper, we introduce FedTrans, a novel client-transparent client utility estimation method designed to guide client selection for noisy scenarios, mitigating performance degradation problems. To estimate the client utility, we propose a Bayesian framework that models client utility and its relationships with the weight parameters and the performance of local models. We then introduce a variational inference algorithm to effectively infer client utility at the FL server, given only a small amount of auxiliary data. Our evaluation results demonstrate that leveraging FedTrans to select the clients can improve the accuracy performance (up to 7.8%), ensuring the robustness of FL in noisy scenarios. ...
Conference paper (2023) - Ran Zhu, Mingkun Yang, Jie Yang, Qing Wang
Federated Learning (FL) is an important privacy-preserving learning paradigm that is expected to play an essential role in the future Intelligent Internet of Things (IoT). However, model training in FL is vulnerable to noise and the statistical heterogeneity of local data across IoT clients. In this paper, we propose FedNaWi, a “Go Narrow, Then Wide” client selection method that speeds up the FL training, achieves higher model performance, while requiring no additional data or sensitive information transfer from clients. Our method first selects reliable clients (i.e., going narrow) which allows the global model to quickly improve its performance and then includes less reliable clients (i.e., going wide) to exploit more IoT data of clients to further improve the global model. To profile client utility, we introduce a unified Bayesian framework to model the client utility at the FL server, assisted by a small amount of auxiliary data. We conduct extensive evaluations with 5 state-of-the-art FL methods, on 3 IoT tasks and under 7 different types of label and feature noise. We build an FL testbed with 38 IoT nodes (20 nodes run on Raspberry Pi 4B and 18 nodes run on Jetson Nano) for the evaluation. Our results show that FedNaWi improves the FL accuracy substantially and significantly reduces energy consumption. In particular, FedNaWi improves the accuracy from 35% to 75% in the non-IID Dirichlet setting, and reduces the average energy consumption by 55%. ...