Parameterizing Federated Continual Learning for Reproducible Research

Abstract

Federated Learning (FL) systems evolve in heterogeneous and ever-evolving environments that challenge their performance. Under real deployments, the learning tasks of clients can also evolve with time, which calls for the integration of methodologies such as Continual Learning (CL). To enable research reproducibility, we propose a set of experimental best practices that precisely capture and emulate complex learning scenarios. To the best of our knowledge, our framework, Freddie, is the first entirely configurable framework for Federated Continual Learning (FCL), and it can be seamlessly deployed on a large number of machines leveraging containerization and Kubernetes. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Freddie on two use cases, (i) large-scale concurrent FL on CIFAR100 and (ii) heterogeneous task sequence on FCL, which highlight unaddressed performance challenges in FCL scenarios.