{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/pfl-research-simulation-framework-for","title":"pfl-research: simulation framework for accelerating research in Private Federated Learning","arxiv_id":"2404.06430","date":"2024-04-09","proceeding":null,"authors":["Filip Granqvist","Congzheng Song","Áine Cahill","Rogier Van Dalen","Martin Pelikan","Yi Sheng Chan","Xiaojun Feng","Natarajan Krishnaswami","Vojta Jina","Mona Chitnis"],"abstract":"Federated learning (FL) is an emerging machine learning (ML) training paradigm where clients own their data and collaborate to train a global model, without revealing any data to the server and other participants. Researchers commonly perform experiments in a simulation environment to quickly iterate on ideas. However, existing open-source tools do not offer the efficiency required to simulate FL on larger and more realistic FL datasets. We introduce pfl-research, a fast, modular, and easy-to-use Python framework for simulating FL. It supports TensorFlow, PyTorch, and non-neural network models, and is tightly integrated with state-of-the-art privacy algorithms. We study the speed of open-source FL frameworks and show that pfl-research is 7-72$\\times$ faster than alternative open-source frameworks on common cross-device setups. Such speedup will significantly boost the productivity of the FL research community and enable testing hypotheses on realistic FL datasets that were previously too resource intensive. We release a suite of benchmarks that evaluates an algorithm's overall performance on a diverse set of realistic scenarios. The code is available on GitHub at https://github.com/apple/pfl-research.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.06430v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.06430v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"pfl-research-simulation-framework-for","repo_url":"https://github.com/apple/pfl-research","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"federated-learning","task_name":"Federated Learning"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"set","method_name":"SET"},{"method_slug":"speed","method_name":"SPEED"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2404.06430","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}