AIGC-assisted Federated Learning for Edge Intelligence: Architecture Design, Research Challenges and Future Directions

Federated learning (FL) can fully leverage large-scale terminal data while ensuring privacy and security, and is considered as a distributed alternative for the centralized machine learning. However, the issue of data heterogeneity poses limitations on FL's performance. To address this challenge, artificial intelligence-generated content (AIGC) which is an innovative data synthesis technique emerges as one potential solution. In this article, we first provide an overview of the system architecture, performance metrics, and challenges associated with AIGC-assistant FL system design. We then propose the Generative federated learning (GenFL) architecture and present its workflow, including the design of aggregation and weight policy. Finally, using the CIFAR10 and CIFAR100 datasets, we employ diffusion models to generate dataset and improve FL performance. Experiments conducted under various non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) data distributions demonstrate the effectiveness of GenFL on overcoming the bottlenecks in FL caused by data heterogeneity. Open research directions in the research of AIGC-assisted FL are also discussed.

Adaptive and Parallel Split Federated Learning in Vehicular Edge Computing

Vehicular edge intelligence (VEI) is a promising paradigm for enabling future intelligent transportation systems by accommodating artificial intelligence (AI) at the vehicular edge computing (VEC) system. Federated learning (FL) stands as one of the fundamental technologies facilitating collaborative model training locally and aggregation, while safeguarding the privacy of vehicle data in VEI. However, traditional FL faces challenges in adapting to vehicle heterogeneity, training large models on resource-constrained vehicles, and remaining susceptible to model weight privacy leakage. Meanwhile, split learning (SL) is proposed as a promising collaborative learning framework which can mitigate the risk of model wights leakage, and release the training workload on vehicles. SL sequentially trains a model between a vehicle and an edge cloud (EC) by dividing the entire model into a vehicle-side model and an EC-side model at a given cut layer. In this work, we combine the advantages of SL and FL to develop an Adaptive Split Federated Learning scheme for Vehicular Edge Computing (ASFV). The ASFV scheme adaptively splits the model and parallelizes the training process, taking into account mobile vehicle selection and resource allocation. Our extensive simulations, conducted on non-independent and identically distributed data, demonstrate that the proposed ASFV solution significantly reduces training latency compared to existing benchmarks, while adapting to network dynamics and vehicles' mobility.