FedSim

FedSim is a comprehensive and flexible Federated Learning Simulator! It aims to provide the researchers with an easy to develope/maintain simulator for Federated Learning. See documentation at here!

Installation

pip install fedsim

That's it! You are all set!

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Design Architecture

CLI

Minimal example

Fedsim provides powerful cli tools that allow you to focus on designing what is truly important. Simply enter the following command to begin federatively training a model.

fedsim-cli fed-learn

The "MNIST" dataset is partitioned on 500 clients by default, and the FedAvg algorithm is used to train a minimal model with two fully connected layers. A text file is made that descibes the configuration for the experiment and a summary of results when it is finished. Additionally, a tensorboard log file is made to monitor the scores/metrics of the training. The directory that these files are stored is (reconfigurable and is) displayed while the experiment is running.

Hooking scores to cli tools

In case you are interested in a certain metric you can make a query for it in your command. For example, lets assume we would like to test and report: * the accuracy score of the global model on global test dataset both every 21 rounds and every 43 rounds. * the average accuracy score of the local models every 15 rounds. Here's how we modify the above command:

fedsim-cli fed-learn \
    --global-score Accuracy score_name:acc21 split:test log_freq:21 \
    --global-score Accuracy score_name:acc43 split:test log_freq:43 \
    --local-score Accuracy split:train log_freq:15

Check Fedsim Scores Page for the list of all other scores like Accyracy or define your custom score.

Changing the Data

Data partitioning and retrieval is controlled by a DataManager object. This object could be controlled through -d or --data-manager flag in most cli commands. In the following we modify the arguments of the default DataManager such that CIFAR100 is partitioned over 1000 clients.

fedsim-cli fed-learn \
    --data-manger BasicDataManager dataset:cifar100 num_partitions:1000 \
    --num-clients 1000 \
    --model SimpleCNN2 num_classes:100 \
    --global-score Accuracy split:test log_freq:15

Notice that we also changed the model from default to SimpleCNN2 which by default takes 3 input channels. You can learn about existing data managers at data manager documentation and Custom data managers at this guide to make Custom data managers.

Note

Arguments of the constructor of any component (rectangular boxes in the image of design architecture) could be given in arg:value format following its name (or path if a local file is provided). Among these component, the algorithm is special, in that the arguments are controlled internally. The only arguments of the algorithm object that could be directly controlled in your commands is the algorithm specific ones (mostly hyper-parameters). Examples:

fedsim-cli fed-learn --algorithm AdaBest mu:0.01 beta:0.6 ...

Feed CLI with Customized Components

The cli tool can take a locally defined component by ingesting its path. For example, to automatically include your custom algorithm by the a command of the cli tool, you can place your class in a python file and pass the path of the file to -a or --algorithm option (without .py) followed by colon and name of the algorithm definition (class or method). For instance, if you have algorithm CustomFLAlgorithm stored in a foo/bar/my_custom_alg.py, you can pass --algorithm foo/bar/my_custom_alg:CustomFLAlgorithm.

fedsim-cli fed-learn --algorithm foo/bar/my_custom_alg_file:CustomFLAlgorithm mu:0.01 ...

The same is possible for any other component, for instance for a Custom model:

fedsim-cli fed-learn --model foo/bar/my_model_file:CustomModel num_classes:1000 ...

More about cli commands

For help with cli check fedsim-cli documentation or read the output of the following commands:

fedsim-cli --help
fedsim-cli fed-learn --help
fedsim-cli fed-tune --help

Python API

Fedsim is shipped with some of the most well-known Federated Learning algorithms included. However, you will most likely need to quickly develop and test your custom algorithm, model, data manager, or score class. Fedsim has been designed in such a way that doing all of these things takes almost no time and effort. Let's start by learning how to import and use Fedsim, and then we'll go over how to easily modify existing modules and classes to your liking. Check the following basic example:

from logall import TensorboardLogger
from fedsim.distributed.centralized.training import FedAvg
from fedsim.distributed.data_management import BasicDataManager
from fedsim.models import SimpleCNN2
from fedsim.losses import CrossEntropyLoss
from fedsim.scores import Accuracy

n_clients = 1000

dm = BasicDataManager("./data", "cifar100", n_clients)
sw = TensorboardLogger(path=None)

alg = FedAvg(
    data_manager=dm,
    num_clients=n_clients,
    sample_scheme="uniform",
    sample_rate=0.01,
    model_def=partial(SimpleCNN2, num_channels=3),
    epochs=5,
    criterion_def=partial(CrossEntropyLoss, log_freq=100),
    batch_size=32,
    metric_logger=sw,
    device="cuda",
)
alg.hook_local_score(
    partial(Accuracy, log_freq=50),
    split='train,
    score_name="accuracy",
)
alg.hook_global_score(
    partial(Accuracy, log_freq=40),
    split='test,
    score_name="accuracy",
)
report_summary = alg.train(rounds=50)

Side Notes

• Do not use double underscores (__) in argument names of your customized classes.