Federated Learning (FL) has become a crucial framework for collaboratively training Machine Learning (ML) models while ensuring data privacy. Traditional synchronous FL approaches, however, suffer from delays caused by slower clients (called stragglers), which hinder the overall training process. Specifically, in a synchronous setting, model aggregation happens once all the intended clients have submitted their local updates to the server. To address these inefficiencies, Buffered Asynchronous FL (BAsyncFL) was introduced, allowing clients to update the global model as soon as they complete local training. In such a setting, the new global model is obtained once the buffer is full, thus removing synchronization bottlenecks. Despite these advantages, existing Secure Aggregation (SA) techniques-designed to protect client updates from inference attacks-rely on synchronized rounds, making them unsuitable for asynchronous settings.

Machine Unlearning (MU) aims at removing the influence of specific data points from a trained model, striving to achieve this at a fraction of the cost of full model retraining. In this paper, we analyze the efficiency of unlearning methods and establish the first upper and lower bounds on minimax computation times for this problem, characterizing the performance of the most efficient algorithm against the most difficult objective function. Specifically, for strongly convex objective functions and under the assumption that the forget data is inaccessible to the unlearning method, we provide a phase diagram for the *unlearning complexity ratio*---a novel metric that compares the computational cost of the best unlearning method to full model retraining. The phase diagram reveals three distinct regimes: one where unlearning at a reduced cost is infeasible, another where unlearning is trivial because adding noise suffices, and a third where unlearning achieves significant computational advantages over retraining. These findings highlight the critical role of factors such as data dimensionality, the number of samples to forget, and privacy constraints in determining the practical feasibility of unlearning.

International audience

Machine Unlearning (MU) is an increasingly important topic in machine learning safety, aiming at removing the contribution of a given data point from a training procedure. Federated Unlearning (FU) consists in extending MU to unlearn a given client’s contribution from a federated training routine. While several FU methods have been proposed, we currently lack a general approach providing formal unlearning guarantees to the FedAvg routine, while ensuring scalability and generalization beyond the convex assumption on the clients’ loss functions. We aim at filling this gap by proposing SIFU (Sequential Informed Federated Unlearning), a new FU method applying to both convex and non-convex optimization regimes. SIFU naturally applies to FedAvg without additional computational cost for the clients and provides formal guarantees on the quality of the unlearning task. We provide a theoretical analysis of the unlearning properties of SIFU, and practically demonstrate its effectiveness as compared to a panel of unlearning methods from the state-of-the-art.

The study of loss-function distributions is critical to characterize a model's behaviour on a given machine-learning problem. While model quality is commonly measured by the average loss assessed on a testing set, this quantity does not ascertain the existence of the mean of the loss distribution. Conversely, the existence of a distribution's statistical moments can be verified by examining the thickness of its tails. Cross-validation schemes determine a family of testing loss distributions conditioned on the training sets. By marginalizing across training sets, we can recover the overall (marginal) loss distribution, whose tail-shape we aim to estimate. Small sample-sizes diminish the reliability and efficiency of classical tail-estimation methods like Peaks-Over-Threshold, and we demonstrate that this effect is notably significant when estimating tails of marginal distributions composed of conditional distributions with substantial tail-location variability. We mitigate this problem by utilizing a result we prove: under certain conditions, the marginal-distribution's tail-shape parameter is the maximum tail-shape parameter across the conditional distributions underlying the marginal. We label the resulting approach as `cross-tail estimation (CTE)'. We test CTE in a series of experiments on simulated and real data showing the improved robustness and quality of tail estimation as compared to classical approaches.

Image registration is a key task in medical imaging applications, allowing to represent medical images in a common spatial reference frame. Current approaches to image registration are generally based on the assumption that the content of the images is usually accessible in clear form, from which the spatial transformation is subsequently estimated. This common assumption may not be met in practical applications, since the sensitive nature of medical images may ultimately require their analysis under privacy constraints, preventing to openly share the image content . In this work, we formulate the problem of image registration under a privacy preserving regime, where images are assumed to be confidential and cannot be disclosed in clear. We derive our privacy preserving image registration framework by extending classical registration paradigms to account for advanced cryptographic tools, such as secure multi-party computation and homomorphic encryption, that enable the execution of operations without leaking the underlying data. To overcome the problem of performance and scalability of cryptographic tools in high dimensions, we propose several techniques to optimize the image registration operations by using gradient approximations, and by revisiting the use of homomorphic encryption trough packing, to allow the efficient encryption and multiplication of large matrices. We focus on registration methods of increasing complexity, including rigid, affine, and non-linear registration based on cubic splines or diffeomorphisms parameterized by time-varying velocity fields . In all these settings, we demonstrate how the registration problem can be naturally adapted for accounting to privacy-preserving operations, and illustrate the effectiveness of PPIR on a variety of registration tasks. • Image registration under a privacy preserving regime. • This work extends classic registration paradigms and integrates cryptographic tools. • Privacy preserving linear & non-linear registration with sum squared differences. • Privacy preserving linear registration with mutual information. • Privacy preserving non-linear registration with cross correlration. • Privacy preserving rigid point cloud registration. • Methods to optimize image registration operations with cryptographic tools. • Results demonstrate the proposed work’s applicability in 2D-3D medical imaging tasks.

We propose a novel framework to study asynchronous federated learning optimization with delays in gradient updates. Our theoretical framework extends the standard FedAvg aggregation scheme by introducing stochastic aggregation weights to represent the variability of the clients update time, due for example to heterogeneous hardware capabilities. Our formalism applies to the general federated setting where clients have heterogeneous datasets and perform at least one step of stochastic gradient descent (SGD). We demonstrate convergence for such a scheme and provide sufficient conditions for the related minimum to be the optimum of the federated problem. We show that our general framework applies to existing optimization schemes including centralized learning, FedAvg, asynchronous FedAvg, and FedBuff. The theory here provided allows drawing meaningful guidelines for designing a federated learning experiment in heterogeneous conditions. In particular, we develop in this work FedFix, a novel extension of FedAvg enabling efficient asynchronous federated training while preserving the convergence stability of synchronous aggregation. We empirically demonstrate our theory on a series of experiments showing that asynchronous FedAvg leads to fast convergence at the expense of stability, and we finally demonstrate the improvements of FedFix over synchronous and asynchronous FedAvg.

Federated Learning (FL) is a novel approach enabling several clients holding sensitive data to collaboratively train machine learning models, without centralizing data. The cross-silo FL setting corresponds to the case of few ($2$--$50$) reliable clients, each holding medium to large datasets, and is typically found in applications such as healthcare, finance, or industry. While previous works have proposed representative datasets for cross-device FL, few realistic healthcare cross-silo FL datasets exist, thereby slowing algorithmic research in this critical application. In this work, we propose a novel cross-silo dataset suite focused on healthcare, FLamby (Federated Learning AMple Benchmark of Your cross-silo strategies), to bridge the gap between theory and practice of cross-silo FL.FLamby encompasses 7 healthcare datasets with natural splits, covering multiple tasks, modalities, and data volumes, each accompanied with baseline training code. As an illustration, we additionally benchmark standard FL algorithms on all datasets.Our flexible and modular suite allows researchers to easily download datasets, reproduce results and re-use the different components for their research. FLamby is available at~\url{www.github.com/owkin/flamby}.

Free-rider attacks against federated learning consist in dissimulating participation to the federated learning process with the goal of obtaining the final aggregated model without actually contributing with any data. This kind of attacks are critical in sensitive applications of federated learning when data is scarce and the model has high commercial value. We introduce here the first theoretical and experimental analysis of free-rider attacks on federated learning schemes based on iterative parameters aggregation, such as FedAvg or FedProx, and provide formal guarantees for these attacks to converge to the aggregated models of the fair participants. We first show that a straightforward implementation of this attack can be simply achieved by not updating the local parameters during the iterative federated optimization. As this attack can be detected by adopting simple countermeasures at the server level, we subsequently study more complex disguising schemes based on stochastic updates of the free-rider parameters. We demonstrate the proposed strategies on a number of experimental scenarios, in both iid and non-iid settings. We conclude by providing recommendations to avoid free-rider attacks in real world applications of federated learning, especially in sensitive domains where security of data and models is critical.

This work addresses the problem of optimizing communications between server and clients in federated learning (FL). Current sampling approaches in FL are either biased, or non optimal in terms of server-clients communications and training stability. To overcome this issue, we introduce clustered sampling for clients selection. We prove that clustered sampling leads to better clients representatitivity and to reduced variance of the clients stochastic aggregation weights in FL. Compatibly with our theory, we provide two different clustering approaches enabling clients aggregation based on 1) sample size, and 2) models similarity. Through a series of experiments in non-iid and unbalanced scenarios, we demonstrate that model aggregation through clustered sampling consistently leads to better training convergence and variability when compared to standard sampling approaches. Our approach does not require any additional operation on the clients side, and can be seamlessly integrated in standard FL implementations. Finally, clustered sampling is compatible with existing methods and technologies for privacy enhancement, and for communication reduction through model compression.

Interpretable modeling of heterogeneous data channels is essential in medical applications, for example when jointly analyzing clinical scores and medical images. Variational Autoencoders (VAE) are powerful generative models that learn representations of complex data. The flexibility of VAE may come at the expense of lack of interpretability in describing the joint relationship between heterogeneous data. To tackle this problem, in this work we extend the variational framework of VAE to bring parsimony and interpretability when jointly account for latent relationships across multiple channels. In the latent space, this is achieved by constraining the variational distribution of each channel to a common target prior. Parsimonious latent representations are enforced by variational dropout. Experiments on synthetic data show that our model correctly identifies the prescribed latent dimensions and data relationships across multiple testing scenarios. When applied to imaging and clinical data, our method allows to identify the joint effect of age and pathology in describing clinical condition in a large scale clinical cohort.

We introduce a novel generative formulation of deep probabilistic models implementing "soft" constraints on their function dynamics. In particular, we develop a flexible methodological framework where the modeled functions and derivatives of a given order are subject to inequality or equality constraints. We then characterize the posterior distribution over model and constraint parameters through stochastic variational inference. As a result, the proposed approach allows for accurate and scalable uncertainty quantification on the predictions and on all parameters. We demonstrate the application of equality constraints in the challenging problem of parameter inference in ordinary differential equation models, while we showcase the application of inequality constraints on the problem of monotonic regression of count data. The proposed approach is extensively tested in several experimental settings, leading to highly competitive results in challenging modeling applications, while offering high expressiveness, flexibility and scalability.