IBM Federated Learning: an Enterprise Framework White Paper V0.1

TL;DR

This paper introduces IBM Federated Learning, a framework that enables data scientists to implement federated machine learning efficiently across enterprise environments, addressing key challenges like data heterogeneity and coordination.

Contribution

The paper presents a comprehensive infrastructure and coordination framework for federated learning that integrates with existing machine learning models and simplifies deployment.

Findings

Supports deep neural networks and traditional ML models

Facilitates deployment across diverse compute environments

Reduces learning curve for federated learning adoption

Abstract

Federated Learning (FL) is an approach to conduct machine learning without centralizing training data in a single place, for reasons of privacy, confidentiality or data volume. However, solving federated machine learning problems raises issues above and beyond those of centralized machine learning. These issues include setting up communication infrastructure between parties, coordinating the learning process, integrating party results, understanding the characteristics of the training data sets of different participating parties, handling data heterogeneity, and operating with the absence of a verification data set. IBM Federated Learning provides infrastructure and coordination for federated learning. Data scientists can design and run federated learning jobs based on existing, centralized machine learning models and can provide high-level instructions on how to run the federation. The framework applies to both Deep Neural Networks as well as ``traditional'' approaches for the most common machine learning libraries. {\proj} enables data scientists to expand their scope from centralized to federated machine learning, minimizing the learning curve at the outset while also providing the flexibility to deploy to different compute environments and design custom fusion algorithms.