Posted by Jae Hun Ro, Software Engineer and Ananda Theertha Suresh, Research Scientist, Google Research
Federated learning is a machine learning setting where many clients (i.e., mobile devices or whole organizations, depending on the task at hand) collaboratively train a model under the orchestration of a central server, while keeping the training data decentralized. For example, federated learning makes it possible to train virtual keyboard language models based on user data that never leaves a mobile device.
Federated learning algorithms accomplish this by first initializing the model at the server and completing three key steps for each round of training:
The server sends the model to a set of sampled clients. These sampled clients train the model on local data. After training, the clients send the updated models to the server and the server aggregates them together. An example federated learning algorithm with four clients.
Federated learning has become a particularly active area of research due to an increased focus on privacy and security. Being able to easily translate ideas into code, iterate quickly, and compare and reproduce existing baselines is important for such a fast growing field.
In light of this, we are excited to introduce FedJAX, a JAX-based open source library for federated learning simulations that emphasizes ease-of-use in research. With its simple building blocks for implementing federated algorithms, prepackaged datasets, models and algorithms, and fast simulation speed, FedJAX aims to make developing and evaluating federated algorithms faster and easier for researchers. In this post we discuss the library structure and contents of FedJAX. We demonstrate that on TPUs FedJAX can be used to train models with federated averaging on the EMNIST dataset in a few minutes, and the Stack Overflow dataset in roughly an hour with standard hyperparameters.
Library Structure
Keeping ease of use in mind, FedJAX introduces only a few new concepts.
This article is purposely trimmed, please visit the source to read the full article.
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