Resource-Efficient Federated Multimodal Learning via Layer-wise and Progressive Training

Combining different data modalities enables deep neural networks to tackle complex tasks more effectively, making multimodal learning increasingly popular. To harness multimodal data closer to end users, it is essential to integrate multimodal learning with privacy-preserving training approaches such as federated learning (FL). However, compared to conventional unimodal learning, multimodal setting requires dedicated encoders for each modality, resulting in larger and more complex models that demand significant resources. This presents a substantial challenge for FL clients operating with limited computational resources and communication bandwidth. To address these challenges, we introduce LW-FedMML, a layer-wise federated multimodal learning approach, which decomposes the training process into multiple steps. Each step focuses on training only a portion of the model, thereby significantly reducing the memory and computational requirements. Moreover, FL clients only need to exchange the trained model portion with the central server, lowering the resulting communication cost. We conduct extensive experiments across various FL scenarios and multimodal learning setups to validate the effectiveness of our proposed method. The results demonstrate that LW-FedMML can compete with conventional end-to-end federated multimodal learning (FedMML) while significantly reducing the resource burden on FL clients. Specifically, LW-FedMML reduces memory usage by up to $2.7\times$, computational operations (FLOPs) by $2.4\times$, and total communication cost by $2.3\times$. We also introduce a progressive training approach called Prog-FedMML. While it offers lesser resource efficiency than LW-FedMML, Prog-FedMML has the potential to surpass the performance of end-to-end FedMML, making it a viable option for scenarios with fewer resource constraints.

Cross-Modal Prototype based Multimodal Federated Learning under Severely Missing Modality

Multimodal federated learning (MFL) has emerged as a decentralized machine learning paradigm, allowing multiple clients with different modalities to collaborate on training a machine learning model across diverse data sources without sharing their private data. However, challenges, such as data heterogeneity and severely missing modalities, pose crucial hindrances to the robustness of MFL, significantly impacting the performance of global model. The absence of a modality introduces misalignment during the local training phase, stemming from zero-filling in the case of clients with missing modalities. Consequently, achieving robust generalization in global model becomes imperative, especially when dealing with clients that have incomplete data. In this paper, we propose Multimodal Federated Cross Prototype Learning (MFCPL), a novel approach for MFL under severely missing modalities by conducting the complete prototypes to provide diverse modality knowledge in modality-shared level with the cross-modal regularization and modality-specific level with cross-modal contrastive mechanism. Additionally, our approach introduces the cross-modal alignment to provide regularization for modality-specific features, thereby enhancing overall performance, particularly in scenarios involving severely missing modalities. Through extensive experiments on three multimodal datasets, we demonstrate the effectiveness of MFCPL in mitigating these challenges and improving the overall performance.

LW-FedSSL: Resource-efficient Layer-wise Federated Self-supervised Learning

Many recent studies integrate federated learning (FL) with self-supervised learning (SSL) to take advantage of raw training data distributed across edge devices. However, edge devices often struggle with high computation and communication costs imposed by SSL and FL algorithms. To tackle this hindrance, we propose LW-FedSSL, a layer-wise federated self-supervised learning approach that allows edge devices to incrementally train one layer of the model at a time. LW-FedSSL comprises server-side calibration and representation alignment mechanisms to maintain comparable performance with end-to-end FedSSL while significantly lowering clients' resource requirements. The server-side calibration mechanism takes advantage of the resource-rich server in an FL environment to assist in global model training. Meanwhile, the representation alignment mechanism encourages closeness between representations of FL local models and those of the global model. Our experiments show that LW-FedSSL has a $3.3 \times$ lower memory requirement and a $3.2 \times$ cheaper communication cost than its end-to-end counterpart. We also explore a progressive training strategy called Prog-FedSSL that outperforms end-to-end training with a similar memory requirement and a $1.8 \times$ cheaper communication cost.

Attention on Personalized Clinical Decision Support System: Federated Learning Approach

Health management has become a primary problem as new kinds of diseases and complex symptoms are introduced to a rapidly growing modern society. Building a better and smarter healthcare infrastructure is one of the ultimate goals of a smart city. To the best of our knowledge, neural network models are already employed to assist healthcare professionals in achieving this goal. Typically, training a neural network requires a rich amount of data but heterogeneous and vulnerable properties of clinical data introduce a challenge for the traditional centralized network. Moreover, adding new inputs to a medical database requires re-training an existing model from scratch. To tackle these challenges, we proposed a deep learning-based clinical decision support system trained and managed under a federated learning paradigm. We focused on a novel strategy to guarantee the safety of patient privacy and overcome the risk of cyberattacks while enabling large-scale clinical data mining. As a result, we can leverage rich clinical data for training each local neural network without the need for exchanging the confidential data of patients. Moreover, we implemented the proposed scheme as a sequence-to-sequence model architecture integrating the attention mechanism. Thus, our objective is to provide a personalized clinical decision support system with evolvable characteristics that can deliver accurate solutions and assist healthcare professionals in medical diagnosing.

OnDev-LCT: On-Device Lightweight Convolutional Transformers towards federated learning

Federated learning (FL) has emerged as a promising approach to collaboratively train machine learning models across multiple edge devices while preserving privacy. The success of FL hinges on the efficiency of participating models and their ability to handle the unique challenges of distributed learning. While several variants of Vision Transformer (ViT) have shown great potential as alternatives to modern convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for centralized training, the unprecedented size and higher computational demands hinder their deployment on resource-constrained edge devices, challenging their widespread application in FL. Since client devices in FL typically have limited computing resources and communication bandwidth, models intended for such devices must strike a balance between model size, computational efficiency, and the ability to adapt to the diverse and non-IID data distributions encountered in FL. To address these challenges, we propose OnDev-LCT: Lightweight Convolutional Transformers for On-Device vision tasks with limited training data and resources. Our models incorporate image-specific inductive biases through the LCT tokenizer by leveraging efficient depthwise separable convolutions in residual linear bottleneck blocks to extract local features, while the multi-head self-attention (MHSA) mechanism in the LCT encoder implicitly facilitates capturing global representations of images. Extensive experiments on benchmark image datasets indicate that our models outperform existing lightweight vision models while having fewer parameters and lower computational demands, making them suitable for FL scenarios with data heterogeneity and communication bottlenecks.

Federated Learning with Diffusion Models for Privacy-Sensitive Vision Tasks

Diffusion models have shown great potential for vision-related tasks, particularly for image generation. However, their training is typically conducted in a centralized manner, relying on data collected from publicly available sources. This approach may not be feasible or practical in many domains, such as the medical field, which involves privacy concerns over data collection. Despite the challenges associated with privacy-sensitive data, such domains could still benefit from valuable vision services provided by diffusion models. Federated learning (FL) plays a crucial role in enabling decentralized model training without compromising data privacy. Instead of collecting data, an FL system gathers model parameters, effectively safeguarding the private data of different parties involved. This makes FL systems vital for managing decentralized learning tasks, especially in scenarios where privacy-sensitive data is distributed across a network of clients. Nonetheless, FL presents its own set of challenges due to its distributed nature and privacy-preserving properties. Therefore, in this study, we explore the FL strategy to train diffusion models, paving the way for the development of federated diffusion models. We conduct experiments on various FL scenarios, and our findings demonstrate that federated diffusion models have great potential to deliver vision services to privacy-sensitive domains.

Contrastive encoder pre-training-based clustered federated learning for heterogeneous data

Federated learning (FL) is a promising approach that enables distributed clients to collaboratively train a global model while preserving their data privacy. However, FL often suffers from data heterogeneity problems, which can significantly affect its performance. To address this, clustered federated learning (CFL) has been proposed to construct personalized models for different client clusters. One effective client clustering strategy is to allow clients to choose their own local models from a model pool based on their performance. However, without pre-trained model parameters, such a strategy is prone to clustering failure, in which all clients choose the same model. Unfortunately, collecting a large amount of labeled data for pre-training can be costly and impractical in distributed environments. To overcome this challenge, we leverage self-supervised contrastive learning to exploit unlabeled data for the pre-training of FL systems. Together, self-supervised pre-training and client clustering can be crucial components for tackling the data heterogeneity issues of FL. Leveraging these two crucial strategies, we propose contrastive pre-training-based clustered federated learning (CP-CFL) to improve the model convergence and overall performance of FL systems. In this work, we demonstrate the effectiveness of CP-CFL through extensive experiments in heterogeneous FL settings, and present various interesting observations.

Training A Semantic Communication System with Federated Learning

Semantic communication has emerged as a pillar for the next generation of communication systems due to its capabilities in alleviating data redundancy. Most semantic communication systems are built using advanced deep learning models whose performance heavily depends on data availability. These studies assume that an abundance of training data is available, which is unrealistic. In practice, data is mainly created on the user side. Due to privacy and security concerns, the transmission of data is restricted, which is necessary for conventional centralized training schemes. To address this challenge, we explore semantic communication in federated learning (FL) setting that utilizes user data without leaking privacy. Additionally, we design our system to tackle the communication overhead by reducing the quantity of information delivered in each global round. In this way, we can save significant bandwidth for resource-limited devices and reduce overall network traffic. Finally, we propose a mechanism to aggregate the global model from the clients, called FedLol. Extensive simulation results demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed technique compared to baseline methods.

A Complete Survey on Generative AI : Is ChatGPT from GPT-4 to GPT-5 All You Need?

As ChatGPT goes viral, generative AI (AIGC, a.k.a AI-generated content) has made headlines everywhere because of its ability to analyze and create text, images, and beyond. With such overwhelming media coverage, it is almost impossible for us to miss the opportunity to glimpse AIGC from a certain angle. In the era of AI transitioning from pure analysis to creation, it is worth noting that ChatGPT, with its most recent language model GPT-4, is just a tool out of numerous AIGC tasks. Impressed by the capability of the ChatGPT, many people are wondering about its limits: can GPT-5 (or other future GPT variants) help ChatGPT unify all AIGC tasks for diversified content creation? Toward answering this question, a comprehensive review of existing AIGC tasks is needed. As such, our work comes to fill this gap promptly by offering a first look at AIGC, ranging from its techniques to applications. Modern generative AI relies on various technical foundations, ranging from model architecture and self-supervised pretraining to generative modeling methods (like GAN and diffusion models). After introducing the fundamental techniques, this work focuses on the technological development of various AIGC tasks based on their output type, including text, images, videos, 3D content, etc., which depicts the full potential of ChatGPT's future. Moreover, we summarize their significant applications in some mainstream industries, such as education and creativity content. Finally, we discuss the challenges currently faced and present an outlook on how generative AI might evolve in the near future.

Federated Learning based Energy Demand Prediction with Clustered Aggregation

To reduce negative environmental impacts, power stations and energy grids need to optimize the resources required for power production. Thus, predicting the energy consumption of clients is becoming an important part of every energy management system. Energy usage information collected by the clients' smart homes can be used to train a deep neural network to predict the future energy demand. Collecting data from a large number of distributed clients for centralized model training is expensive in terms of communication resources. To take advantage of distributed data in edge systems, centralized training can be replaced by federated learning where each client only needs to upload model updates produced by training on its local data. These model updates are aggregated into a single global model by the server. But since different clients can have different attributes, model updates can have diverse weights and as a result, it can take a long time for the aggregated global model to converge. To speed up the convergence process, we can apply clustering to group clients based on their properties and aggregate model updates from the same cluster together to produce a cluster specific global model. In this paper, we propose a recurrent neural network based energy demand predictor, trained with federated learning on clustered clients to take advantage of distributed data and speed up the convergence process.