Flower - A Friendly Federated Learning Framework

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Flower (flwr) is a framework for building federated learning systems. The design of Flower is based on a few guiding principles:

• Customizable: Federated learning systems vary wildly from one use case to another. Flower allows for a wide range of different configurations depending on the needs of each individual use case.

• Extendable: Flower originated from a research project at the Univerity of Oxford, so it was build with AI research in mind. Many components can be extended and overridden to build new state-of-the-art systems.

• Framework-agnostic: Different machine learning frameworks have different strengths. Flower can be used with any machine learning framework, for example, PyTorch, TensorFlow, Hugging Face Transformers, PyTorch Lightning, MXNet, scikit-learn, TFLite, or even raw NumPy for users who enjoy computing gradients by hand.

• Understandable: Flower is written with maintainability in mind. The community is encouraged to both read and contribute to the codebase.

Meet the Flower community on flower.dev!

Documentation

Flower Docs:

• Installation
• Quickstart (TensorFlow)
• Quickstart (PyTorch)
• Quickstart (Hugging Face [code example])
• Quickstart (PyTorch Lightning [code example])
• Quickstart (MXNet)
• Quickstart (scikit-learn)
• Quickstart (TFLite on Android [code example])

Flower Usage Examples

A number of examples show different usage scenarios of Flower (in combination with popular machine learning frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow). To run an example, first install the necessary extras:

Usage Examples Documentation

Quickstart examples:

• Quickstart (TensorFlow)
• Quickstart (PyTorch)
• Quickstart (Hugging Face)
• Quickstart (PyTorch Lightning)
• Quickstart (MXNet)
• Quickstart (scikit-learn)
• Quickstart (TFLite on Android)

Other examples:

• Raspberry Pi & Nvidia Jetson Tutorial
• Android & TFLite
• PyTorch: From Centralized to Federated
• MXNet: From Centralized to Federated
• Advanced Flower with TensorFlow/Keras
• Single-Machine Simulation of Federated Learning Systems

Flower Baselines / Datasets

Experimental - curious minds can take a peek at baselines.

Community

Flower is built by a wonderful community of researchers and engineers. Join Slack to meet them, contributions are welcome.

Citation

If you publish work that uses Flower, please cite Flower as follows:

@article{beutel2020flower,
  title={Flower: A Friendly Federated Learning Research Framework},
  author={Beutel, Daniel J and Topal, Taner and Mathur, Akhil and Qiu, Xinchi and Parcollet, Titouan and Lane, Nicholas D},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2007.14390},
  year={2020}
}

Please also consider adding your publication to the list of Flower-based publications in the docs, just open a Pull Request.

Contributing to Flower

We welcome contributions. Please see CONTRIBUTING.md to get started!