BAYESIAN NONPARAMETRIC LEARNING OF NEURAL NETWORKS

In federated learning problems, data is scattered across different servers and exchanging or pooling it is often impractical or prohibited. A Bayesian nonparametric framework is presented for federated learning with neural networks. Each data server is assumed to provide local neural network weights, which are modeled through our framework. An inference approach is presented that allows us to synthesize a more expressive global network without additional supervision, data pooling and with as few as a single communication round. The efficacy of the present invention on federated learning problems simulated from two popular image classification datasets is shown.