In-Network Learning: Distributed Training and Inference in Networks

It is widely perceived that leveraging the success of modern machine learning techniques to mobile devices and wireless networks has the potential of enabling important new services. This, however, poses significant challenges, essentially due to that both data and processing power are highly distributed in a wireless network. In this paper, we develop a learning algorithm and an architecture that make use of multiple data streams and processing units, not only during the training phase but also during the inference phase. In particular, the analysis reveals how inference propagates and fuses across a network. We study the design criterion of our proposed method and its bandwidth requirements. Also, we discuss implementation aspects using neural networks in typical wireless radio access; and provide experiments that illustrate benefits over state-of-the-art techniques.

On In-network learning. A Comparative Study with Federated and Split Learning

In this paper, we consider a problem in which distributively extracted features are used for performing inference in wireless networks. We elaborate on our proposed architecture, which we herein refer to as "in-network learning", provide a suitable loss function and discuss its optimization using neural networks. We compare its performance with both Federated- and Split learning; and show that this architecture offers both better accuracy and bandwidth savings.