Sun, March 3, 4:30 PM
90 MINUTES
Evaluation of Generative Models in Federated Learning

The evaluation of deep generative models has been extensively studied in the machine learning community. While the existing evaluation methods focus on centralized learning problems with training data stored by a single client, many applications of generative models concern distributed learning settings, e.g. in federated learning, where training data are collected by and distributed among several clients. In this seminar, we discuss the evaluation of generative models in distributed contexts. We show potential inconsistent rankings following different aggregations of standard evaluation scores, such as FID distance, in a distributed network. We present numerical results on benchmark datasets and generative model training schemes to support our theoretical findings on the evaluation of generative models in distributed learning settings.

Farzan Farnia

Assistant Professor @ The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Farzan Farnia is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Prior to joining CUHK, he was a postdoctoral research associate at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, from 2019-2021. He received his master’s and PhD degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University and his bachelor’s degrees in electrical engineering and mathematics from Sharif University of Technology. Farzan's research interests span statistical learning theory, information theory, and convex optimization.