Federated Learning - Yang Liu Synthesis Lectures on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

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1.3.3 STANDARDIZATION EFFORTS

      As more developments are made in the legal front on the secure and responsible use of users’ data, technical standard needs to be developed to ensure that organizations use the same language and follow a standard guideline in developing future federated learning systems. Moreover, there is increasing need for the technical community to communicate with the regulatory and legal communities over the use of the technology. As a result, it is important to develop international standards that can be adopted by multiple disciplines.

      For example, companies striving to satisfy the GDPR requirements need to know what technical developments are needed in order to satisfy the legal requirements. Standards can provide a bridge between regulators and technical developers.

      One of the early standards is initiated by the AI Department at WeBank with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) P3652.1 Federated Machine Learning Working Group (known as Federated Machine Learning (C/LT/FML)) was established in December 2018 [IEEE P3652.1, 2019]. The objective of this working group is to provide guidelines for building the architectural framework and applications of federated ML. The working group will define the architectural framework and application guidelines for federated ML, including:

      1. The description and definition of federated learning;

      2. The types of federated learning and the application scenarios to which each type applies;

      3. Performance evaluation of federated learning; and

      4. The associated regulatory requirements.

      The purpose of this standard is to provide a feasible solution for the industrial application of AI without exchanging data directly. This standard is expected to promote and facilitate collaborations in an environment where privacy and data protection issues have become increasingly important. It will promote and enable to the use of distributed data sources for the purpose of developing AI without violating regulations or ethical concerns.

      The Federated AI (FedAI) ecosystem project was initiated by the AI Department of WeBank [WeBank FedAI, 2019]. The primary goal of the project is to develop and promote advanced AI technologies that preserve user privacy, data security, and data confidentiality. The federated AI ecosystem features four main themes.

      • Open-source technologies: FedAI aims to accelerate open-source development of federated ML and its applications. The FATE project [WeBank FATE, 2019] is a flagship project under FedAI.

      • Standards and guidelines: FedAI, together with partners, are drawing up standardization to formulate the architectural framework and application guidelines of federated learning, and facilitate industry collaboration. One representative work is the IEEE P3652.1 federated ML working group [IEEE P3652.1, 2019].

      • Multi-party consensus mechanisms: FedAI is studying incentive and reward mechanisms to encourage more institutions to participate in federated learning research and development in a sustainable way. For example, FedAI is undertaking work to establish a multiparty consensus mechanism based on technologies like blockchain.

      • Applications in various verticals: To open up the potential of federated learning, FedAI endeavors to showcase more vertical field applications and scenarios, and to build new business models.

      The organization of this book is as follows. Chapter 2 provides background information on privacy-preserving ML, covering well-known techniques for data security. Chapter 3 describes distributed ML, highlighting the difference between federated learning and distributed ML. Horizontal federated learning, vertical federated learning, and federated transfer learning are elaborated in detail in Chapter 4, Chapter 5, and Chapter 6, respectively. Incentive mechanism design for motivating the participation in federated learning is discussed in Chapter 7. Recent work on extending federated learning to the fields of computer vision, natural language processing, and recommender systems are reviewed in Chapter 8. Chapter 9 presents federated reinforcement learning. The prospect of applying federated learning into various industrial sectors is summarized in Chapter 10. Finally, we provide a summary of this book and looking ahead in Chapter 11. Appendix A provides an overview of recent data protection laws and regulations in the European Union, the United States, and China.

      1arXiv is a repository of electronic preprints (e-prints) hosted by Cornell University. For more information, visit arXiv website https://arxiv.org/.

      2WeBank, opened in December 2014 upon receiving its banking license in China. It is the first digital-only bank in China. WeBank is devoted to offering individuals and SMEs under-served by the current banking system with a variety of convenient and high-quality financial services. For more information on WeBank, please visit https://www.webank.com/en/.

      3TensorFlow is an open-source DL framework, developed and maintained by Google Inc. TensorFlow is widely used in research and implementation of DL. For more information on TensorFlow, readers can refer to its project website https://www.tensorflow.org/ and its GitHub website https://github.com/tensorflow.

      4PyTorch is a popular DL framework and is widely used in research and implementation. For more information, visit the official PyTorch website https://pytorch.org/ and the GitHub PyTorch website https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch.

      CHAPTER 2

       Background

      In this chapter, we introduce the background knowledge related to federated learning, covering privacy-preserving machine learning techniques and data analytics.

      Data leakage and privacy violation incidents have brought about heightened public awareness of the need for AI systems to be able to preserve user privacy and data confidentiality. Researchers are interested in developing techniques for privacy-preserving properties to be built inside machine learning (ML) systems. The resulting systems are known as privacy-preserving machine learning systems (PPML). In fact, 2018 was considered a breakout year for PPML [Mancuso et al., 2019]. PPML is a broad term that generally refers to ML equipped with defense measures for protecting user privacy and data security. The system security and cryptography community has also proposed various secure frameworks for ML.

      In Westin [1968], Westin defined information privacy as follows: “the claim of individuals, groups, or institutions to determine for themselves when, how, and to what extent information about them is communicated to others.” This essentially defines the right to control the access and handling of one’s information. The main idea of information privacy is to have control over the collection and handling of one’s personal data [Mendes and Vilela, 2017].

      In this chapter, we will introduce several popular approaches used in PPML including secure multi-party computation (MPC), homomorphic encryption (HE) for privacy-preserving model training and inference, as well as differential privacy (DP) for preventing unwanted data disclosure. Privacy-preserving gradient descent methods will also be discussed.

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