End-to-End on-device Federated Learning: A case study

With the development of computation capability in devices, companies are eager to utilize ML/DL methods to improve their service quality. However, with traditional Machine Learning approaches, companies need to build up a powerful data center to collect data and perform centralized model training, which turns out to be expensive and inefficient. Federated Learning has been introduced to solve this challenge. Because of its characteristics such as model-only exchange and parallel training, the technique can not only preserve user data privacy but also accelerate model training speed. In this paper, we introduce an approach to end-to-end on-device Machine Learning by utilizing Federated Learning. We validate our approach with an important industrial use case, the wheel steering angle prediction in the field of autonomous driving. Our results show that Federated Learning can significantly improve the quality of local edge models and reach the same accuracy level as compared to the traditional centralized Machine Learning approach without its negative effects. Furthermore, Federated Learning can accelerate model training speed and reduce the communication overhead, which proves that this approach has great strength when deploying ML/DL components to real-world embedded systems.