Recent years have witnessed a large amount of decentralized data in various (edge) devices of end-users, while the decentralized data aggregation remains complicated for machine learning jobs because of regulations and laws. As a practical approach to handling decentralized data, Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative global machine learning model training without sharing sensitive raw data. The servers schedule devices to jobs within the training process of FL. In contrast, device scheduling with multiple jobs in FL remains a critical and open problem. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-job FL framework, which enables the training process of multiple jobs in parallel. The multi-job FL framework is composed of a system model and a scheduling method. The system model enables a parallel training process of multiple jobs, with a cost model based on the data fairness and the training time of diverse devices during the parallel training process. We propose a novel intelligent scheduling approach based on multiple scheduling methods, including an original reinforcement learning-based scheduling method and an original Bayesian optimization-based scheduling method, which corresponds to a small cost while scheduling devices to multiple jobs. We conduct extensive experimentation with diverse jobs and datasets. The experimental results reveal that our proposed approaches significantly outperform baseline approaches in terms of training time (up to 12.73 times faster) and accuracy (up to 46.4% higher).

Although more layers and more parameters generally improve the accuracy of the models, such big models generally have high computational complexity and require big memory, which exceed the capacity of small devices for inference and incurs long training time. In addition, it is difficult to afford long training time and inference time of big models even in high performance servers, as well. As an efficient approach to compress a large deep model (a teacher model) to a compact model (a student model), knowledge distillation emerges as a promising approach to deal with the big models. Existing knowledge distillation methods cannot exploit the elastic available computing resources and correspond to low efficiency. In this paper, we propose an Elastic Deep Learning framework for knowledge Distillation, that is, EDL‐Dist. The advantages of EDL‐Dist are threefold. First, the inference and the training process is separated. Second, elastic available computing resources can be utilized to improve the efficiency. Third, fault‐tolerance of the training and inference processes is supported. We take extensive experimentation to show that the throughput of EDL‐Dist is up to 3.125 times faster than the baseline method (online knowledge distillation) while the accuracy is similar or higher.

SummaryIn recent years, data are typically distributed in multiple organizations while the data security is becoming increasingly important. Federated learning (FL), which enables multiple parties to collaboratively train a model without exchanging the raw data, has attracted more and more attention. Based on the distribution of data, FL can be realized in three scenarios, that is, horizontal, vertical, and hybrid. In this article, we propose to combine distributed machine learning techniques with vertical FL and propose a distributed vertical federated learning (DVFL) approach. The DVFL approach exploits a fully distributed architecture within each party in order to accelerate the training process. In addition, we exploit homomorphic encryption to protect the data against honest‐but‐curious participants. We conduct extensive experimentation in a large‐scale cluster environment and a cloud environment in order to show the efficiency and scalability of our proposed approach. The experiments demonstrate the good scalability of our approach and the significant efficiency advantage (up to 6.8 times with a single server and 15.1 times with multiple servers in terms of the training time) compared with baseline frameworks.

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