Comparing decentralized learning to Federated Learning when training Deep Neural Networks under churn

Abstract: Decentralized Machine Learning could address some problematic facets with Federated Learning. There is no central server acting as an arbiter of whom or what may benefit from Machine Learning models created by the vast amount of data becoming available in recent years. It could also increase the reliability and scalability of Machine Learning systems thereby drawing the benefit of having more data accessible. Gossip Learning is such a protocol, but has primarily been designed with linear models in mind. How does Gossip Learning perform when training Deep Neural Networks? Could it be a viable alternative to Federated Learning? In this thesis, we implement Gossip Learning using two different model merging strategies. We also design and implement two extensions to this protocol with the goal of achieving higher performance when training under churn. The training methods are compared on two tasks: image classification on the Federated Extended MNIST dataset and time- series forecasting on the NN5 dataset. Additionally, we also run an experiment where learners churn, alternating between being available and unavailable. We find that Gossip Learning performs slightly better in settings where learners do not churn but is vastly outperformed in the setting where they do.