Decentralised Learning in Federated Deployment Environments

Abstract

Decentralised learning is attracting more and more interest because it embodies the principles of data minimisation and focused data collection, while favouring the transparency of purpose specification (i.e., the objective for which a model is built). Cloud-centric-only processing and deep learning are no longer strict necessities to train high-fidelity models; edge devices can actively participate in the decentralised learning process by exchanging meta-level information in place of raw data, thus paving the way for better privacy guarantees. In addition, these new possibilities can relieve the network backbone from unnecessary data transfer and allow it to meet strict low-latency requirements by leveraging on-device model inference. This survey provides a detailed and up-to-date overview of the most recent contributions available in the state-of-the-art decentralised learning literature. In particular, it originally provides the reader audience with a clear presentation of the peculiarities of federated settings, with a novel taxonomy of decentralised learning approaches, and with a detailed description of the most relevant and specific system-level contributions of the surveyed solutions for privacy, communication efficiency, non-IIDness, device heterogeneity, and poisoning defense.