Fairness and Robustness in Federated Learning with Virginia Smith

Today we kick off our ICML coverage joined by Virginia Smith, an assistant professor in the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University. In our conversation with Virginia, we explore her work on cross-device federated learning applications, including where the distributed learning aspects of FL are relative to the privacy techniques. We dig into her paper from ICML, Ditto: Fair and Robust Federated Learning Through Personalization, what fairness means in contrast to AI ethics, the particulars of the failure modes, the relationship between models and the things being optimized across devices, and the tradeoffs between fairness and robustness. We also discuss a second paper, Heterogeneity for the Win: One-Shot Federated Clustering, how the proposed method makes heterogeneity beneficial in data, how the heterogeneity of data is classified, and some applications of FL in an unsupervised setting.