Flower: A Friendly Federated AI Framework

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Flower (flwr) is a framework for building federated AI 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 University of Oxford, so it was built 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, scikit-learn, JAX, TFLite, MONAI, fastai, MLX, XGBoost, LeRobot for federated robots, Pandas for federated analytics, 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.ai!

Federated Learning Tutorial

Flower's goal is to make federated learning accessible to everyone. This series of tutorials introduces the fundamentals of federated learning and how to implement them in Flower.

0. What is Federated Learning?

1. An Introduction to Federated Learning

2. Using Strategies in Federated Learning

3. Customize a Flower Strategy

4. Communicate Custom Messages

Stay tuned, more tutorials are coming soon. Topics include Privacy and Security in Federated Learning, and Scaling Federated Learning.

30-Minute Federated Learning Tutorial

(or open the Jupyter Notebook)

Documentation

Flower Docs:

• Installation
• Quickstart (TensorFlow)
• Quickstart (PyTorch)
• Quickstart (Hugging Face)
• Quickstart (PyTorch Lightning)
• Quickstart (Pandas)
• Quickstart (fastai)
• Quickstart (JAX)
• Quickstart (scikit-learn)
• Quickstart (Android [TFLite])
• Quickstart (iOS [CoreML])

Flower Baselines

Flower Baselines is a collection of community-contributed projects that reproduce the experiments performed in popular federated learning publications. Researchers can build on Flower Baselines to quickly evaluate new ideas. The Flower community loves contributions! Make your work more visible and enable others to build on it by contributing it as a baseline!

• DASHA
• DepthFL
• FedBN
• FedMeta
• FedMLB
• FedPer
• FedProx
• FedNova
• HeteroFL
• FedAvgM
• FedRep
• FedStar
• FedWav2vec2
• FjORD
• MOON
• niid-Bench
• TAMUNA
• FedVSSL
• FedXGBoost
• FedPara
• FedAvg
• FedOpt

Please refer to the Flower Baselines Documentation for a detailed categorization of baselines and for additional info including:

• How to use Flower Baselines
• How to contribute a new Flower Baseline

Flower Usage Examples

Several code examples show different usage scenarios of Flower (in combination with popular machine learning frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow).

Quickstart examples:

• Quickstart (TensorFlow)
• Quickstart (PyTorch)
• Quickstart (Hugging Face)
• Quickstart (PyTorch Lightning)
• Quickstart (fastai)
• Quickstart (Pandas)
• Quickstart (JAX)
• Quickstart (MONAI)
• Quickstart (scikit-learn)
• Quickstart (Android [TFLite])
• Quickstart (iOS [CoreML])
• Quickstart (MLX)
• Quickstart (XGBoost)

Other examples:

• Raspberry Pi & Nvidia Jetson Tutorial
• PyTorch: From Centralized to Federated
• Vertical FL
• Federated Finetuning of OpenAI's Whisper
• Federated Finetuning of Large Language Model
• Federated Finetuning of a Vision Transformer
• Advanced Flower with TensorFlow/Keras
• Advanced Flower with PyTorch
• Comprehensive Flower+XGBoost
• Flower with KaplanMeierFitter from the lifelines library
• Sample Level Privacy with Opacus
• Sample Level Privacy with TensorFlow-Privacy
• Flower with a Tabular Dataset

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 Fernandez-Marques, Javier and Gao, Yan and Sani, Lorenzo and Kwing, Hei Li and Parcollet, Titouan and Gusmão, Pedro PB de 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!