From federated learning to federated neural architecture search: a survey

Federated learning is a recently proposed distributed machine learning paradigm for privacy preservation, which has found a wide range of applications where data privacy is of primary concern. Meanwhile, neural architecture search has become very popular in deep learning for automatically tuning the architecture and hyperparameters of deep neural networks. While both federated learning and neural architecture search are faced with many open challenges, searching for optimized neural architectures in the federated learning framework is particularly demanding. This survey paper starts with a brief introduction to federated learning, including both horizontal, vertical, and hybrid federated learning. Then neural architecture search approaches based on reinforcement learning, evolutionary algorithms and gradient-based are presented. This is followed by a description of federated neural architecture search that has recently been proposed, which is categorized into online and offline implementations, and single- and multi-objective search approaches. Finally, remaining open research questions are outlined and promising research topics are suggested.