IPLS: A Framework for Decentralized Federated Learning

Abstract

The proliferation of resourceful mobile devices that store rich, multidimensional and privacy-sensitive user data motivate federated learning, a paradigm that enables mobile devices to produce a machine-learning model without sharing their data. However, the majority of the existing federated frameworks follow a centralized approach. 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 a machine-learning model or join an ongoing training process that has 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 federated learning framework with a negligible accuracy drop of less than 1‰. © 2021 IFIP.