1. pfl-research: simulation framework for accelerating research in Private Federated Learning
- Author
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Granqvist, Filip, Song, Congzheng, Cahill, Áine, van Dalen, Rogier, Pelikan, Martin, Chan, Yi Sheng, Feng, Xiaojun, Krishnaswami, Natarajan, Jina, Vojta, and Chitnis, Mona
- Subjects
Computer Science - Machine Learning ,Computer Science - Artificial Intelligence ,Computer Science - Cryptography and Security ,Computer Science - Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition - Abstract
Federated learning (FL) is an emerging machine learning (ML) training paradigm where clients own their data and collaborate to train a global model, without revealing any data to the server and other participants. Researchers commonly perform experiments in a simulation environment to quickly iterate on ideas. However, existing open-source tools do not offer the efficiency required to simulate FL on larger and more realistic FL datasets. We introduce pfl-research, a fast, modular, and easy-to-use Python framework for simulating FL. It supports TensorFlow, PyTorch, and non-neural network models, and is tightly integrated with state-of-the-art privacy algorithms. We study the speed of open-source FL frameworks and show that pfl-research is 7-72$\times$ faster than alternative open-source frameworks on common cross-device setups. Such speedup will significantly boost the productivity of the FL research community and enable testing hypotheses on realistic FL datasets that were previously too resource intensive. We release a suite of benchmarks that evaluates an algorithm's overall performance on a diverse set of realistic scenarios. The code is available on GitHub at https://github.com/apple/pfl-research.
- Published
- 2024