FedNLP: Benchmarking Federated Learning Methods for Natural Language Processing Tasks
Bill Yuchen Lin, Chaoyang He, Zihang Ze, Hulin Wang, Yufen Hua, Christophe Dupuy, Rahul Gupta, Mahdi Soltanolkotabi, Xiang Ren, Salman Avestimehr
Abstract
Increasing concerns and regulations about data privacy and sparsity necessitate the study of privacy-preserving, decentralized learning methods for natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Federated learning (FL) provides promising approaches for a large number of clients (e.g., personal devices or organizations) to collaboratively learn a shared global model to benefit all clients while allowing users to keep their data locally. Despite interest in studying FL methods for NLP tasks, a systematic comparison and analysis is lacking in the literature. Herein, we present the FedNLP, a benchmarking framework for evaluating federated learning methods on four different task formulations: text classification, sequence tagging, question answering, and seq2seq. We propose a universal interface between Transformer-based language models (e.g., BERT, BART) and FL methods (e.g., FedAvg, FedOPT, etc.) under various non-IID partitioning strategies. Our extensive experiments with FedNLP provide empirical comparisons between FL methods and help us better understand the inherent challenges of this direction. The comprehensive analysis points to intriguing and exciting future research aimed at developing FL methods for NLP tasks.- Anthology ID:
- 2022.findings-naacl.13
- Volume:
- Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2022
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2022
- Address:
- Seattle, United States
- Editors:
- Marine Carpuat, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Ivan Vladimir Meza Ruiz
- Venue:
- Findings
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 157–175
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-naacl.13
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2022.findings-naacl.13
- Cite (ACL):
- Bill Yuchen Lin, Chaoyang He, Zihang Ze, Hulin Wang, Yufen Hua, Christophe Dupuy, Rahul Gupta, Mahdi Soltanolkotabi, Xiang Ren, and Salman Avestimehr. 2022. FedNLP: Benchmarking Federated Learning Methods for Natural Language Processing Tasks. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2022, pages 157–175, Seattle, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- FedNLP: Benchmarking Federated Learning Methods for Natural Language Processing Tasks (Lin et al., Findings 2022)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/emnlp-22-attachments/2022.findings-naacl.13.pdf
- Data
- MRQA, OntoNotes 5.0