IPLS : A Framework for Decentralized Federated Learning

TL;DR

The paper introduces IPLS, a decentralized federated learning framework leveraging IPFS, enabling scalable, robust, and resource-efficient model training without centralized coordination, with accuracy comparable to traditional FL.

Contribution

It presents IPLS, a novel decentralized FL framework based on IPFS that supports dynamic participation and maintains high accuracy with minimal resources.

Findings

Scales with number of participants

Robust against connectivity issues

Achieves near-centralized accuracy

Abstract

The proliferation of resourceful mobile devices that store rich, multidimensional and privacy-sensitive user data motivate the design of federated learning (FL), a machine-learning (ML) paradigm that enables mobile devices to produce an ML model without sharing their data. However, the majority of the existing FL frameworks rely on centralized entities. In this work, we introduce IPLS, a fully decentralized federated learning framework that is partially based on the interplanetary file system (IPFS). By using IPLS and connecting into the corresponding private IPFS network, any party can initiate the training process of an ML model or join an ongoing training process that has already been started by another party. IPLS scales with the number of participants, is robust against intermittent connectivity and dynamic participant departures/arrivals, requires minimal resources, and guarantees that the accuracy of the trained model quickly converges to that of a centralized FL framework with an accuracy drop of less than one per thousand.