Edge Intelligence (EI) enables Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications to run at the edge, where data analysis and decision-making can be performed in real-time and close to data sources. To protect data privacy and unify data silos distributed among end devices in EI, Federated Learning (FL) is proposed for collaborative training shared AI models across multiple devices without compromising data security.  However, the prevailing FL approaches cannot guarantee model generalization and adaptation on heterogeneous clients. Recently, Personalized Federated Learning (PFL) has drawn growing awareness in EI, as it enables striking a productive balance between local-specific training requirements inherent in devices and global-generalized optimization objectives for satisfactory performance.  However, most existing PFL methods are based on the Parameters Interaction-based Architecture (PIA) represented by FedAvg, which causes unaffordable communication burdens due to large-scale parameters transmission between devices and the edge server. In contrast, Logits Interaction-based Architecture (LIA) enables to update model parameters with logits transfer, and gains the advantages of communication lightweight and heterogeneous on-device model allowance compared to PIA. Nevertheless, previous LIA methods attempt to achieve satisfactory performance either relying on unrealistic public datasets or increasing communication overhead for additional information transmission other than logits. To tackle this dilemma, we propose a knowledge cache-driven PFL architecture, named FedCache, which reserves a knowledge cache on the server for fetching personalized knowledge from the samples with similar hashes to each given on-device sample. During the training phase, ensemble distillation is applied to on-device models for constructive optimization with personalized knowledge transferred from the server-side knowledge cache.  Empirical experiments on four datasets demonstrate the comparable performance of FedCache with state-of-art PFL approaches, with more than two orders of magnitude improvements in communication efficiency. Our code and DEMO are available at https://github.com/wuzhiyuan2000/FedCache.

Federated Distillation (FD) offers an innovative approach to distributed machine learning, leveraging knowledge distillation for efficient and flexible cross-device knowledge transfer without necessitating the upload of extensive model parameters to a central server. While FD has gained popularity, its vulnerability to poisoning attacks remains underexplored. To address this gap, we previously introduced FDLA (Federated Distillation Logits Attack), a method that manipulates logits communication to mislead and degrade the performance of client models. However, the impact of FDLA on participants with different identities and the effects of malicious modifications at various stages of knowledge transfer remain unexplored. To this end, we present PCFDLA (Peak-Controlled Federated Distillation Logits Attack), an advanced and more stealthy logits poisoning attack method for FD. PCFDLA enhances the effectiveness of FDLA by carefully controlling the peak values of logits to create highly misleading yet inconspicuous modifications. Furthermore, we introduce a novel metric for better evaluating attack efficacy, demonstrating that PCFDLA maintains stealth while being significantly more disruptive to victim models compared to its predecessors. Experimental results across various datasets confirm the superior impact of PCFDLA on model accuracy, solidifying its potential threat in federated distillation systems.

Federated Learning (FL) enables training Artificial Intelligence (AI) models over end devices without compromising their privacy. As computing tasks are increasingly performed by a combination of cloud, edge, and end devices, FL can benefit from this End-Edge-Cloud Collaboration (EECC) paradigm to achieve collaborative device-scale expansion with real-time access. Although Hierarchical Federated Learning (HFL) supports multi-tier model aggregation suitable for EECC, prior works assume the same model structure on all computing nodes, constraining the model scale by the weakest end devices. To address this issue, we propose Agglomerative Federated Learning (FedAgg), which is a novel EECC-empowered FL framework that allows the trained models from end, edge, to cloud to grow larger in size and stronger in generalization ability. FedAgg recursively organizes computing nodes among all tiers based on Bridge Sample Based Online Distillation Protocol (BSBODP), which enables every pair of parent-child computing nodes to mutually transfer and distill knowledge extracted from generated bridge samples. This design enhances the performance by exploiting the potential of larger models, with privacy constraints of FL and flexibility requirements of EECC both satisfied. Experiments under various settings demonstrate that FedAgg outperforms state-of-the-art methods by an average of 4.53% accuracy gains and remarkable improvements in convergence rate. Our code is available at https://github.com/wuzhiyuan2000/FedAgg.

This manuscript is Under Review of IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing.