The Flower Team is excited to announce the release of Flower 1.6 stable! Flower is a friendly framework for collaborative AI and data science. It makes novel approaches such as federated learning, federated evaluation, federated analytics, and fleet learning accessible to a wide audience of researchers and engineers.
Thanks to our contributors
We would like to give our special thanks to all the contributors who made the new version of Flower possible (in git shortlog order):
Aashish Kolluri, Adam Narozniak, Alessio Mora, Barathwaja S, Charles Beauville, Daniel J. Beutel, Daniel Nata Nugraha, Gabriel Mota, Heng Pan, Ivan Agarský, JS.KIM, Javier, Marius Schlegel, Navin Chandra, Nic Lane, Peterpan828, Qinbin Li, Shaz-hash, Steve Laskaridis, Taner Topal, William Lindskog, Yan Gao, cnxdeveloper, k3nfalt
What's new?
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Add experimental support for Python 3.12 (#2565)
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Add new XGBoost examples (#2612, #2554, #2617, #2618, #2619, #2567)
We have added a new xgboost-quickstart example alongside a new xgboost-comprehensive example that goes more in-depth.
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Add Vertical FL example (#2598)
We had many questions about Vertical Federated Learning using Flower, so we decided to add an simple example for it on the Titanic dataset alongside a tutorial (in the README).
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Support custom ClientManager in start_driver() (#2292)
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Update REST API to support create and delete nodes (#2283)
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Update the Android SDK (#2187)
Add gRPC request-response capability to the Android SDK.
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Update the C++ SDK (#2537, #2528, #2523, #2522)
Add gRPC request-response capability to the C++ SDK.
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Make HTTPS the new default (#2591, #2636)
Flower is moving to HTTPS by default. The new flower-server requires passing --certificates, but users can enable --insecure to use HTTP for prototyping. The same applies to flower-client, which can either use user-provided credentials or gRPC-bundled certificates to connect to an HTTPS-enabled server or requires opt-out via passing --insecure to enable insecure HTTP connections.
For backward compatibility, start_client() and start_numpy_client() will still start in insecure mode by default. In a future release, insecure connections will require user opt-in by passing insecure=True.
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Unify client API (#2303, #2390, #2493)
Using the client_fn, Flower clients can interchangeably run as standalone processes (i.e. via start_client) or in simulation (i.e. via start_simulation) without requiring changes to how the client class is defined and instantiated. The to_client() function is introduced to convert a NumPyClient to a Client.
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Add new Bulyan strategy (#1817, #1891)
The new Bulyan strategy implements Bulyan by El Mhamdi et al., 2018
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Add new XGB Bagging strategy (#2611)
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Update Flower Baselines
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General updates to Flower Examples (#2384,#2425, #2526, #2302, #2545)
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General updates to Flower Baselines (#2301, #2305, #2307, #2327, #2435, #2462, #2463, #2461, #2469, #2466, #2471, #2472, #2470)
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General updates to the simulation engine (#2331, #2447, #2448, #2294)
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General updates to Flower SDKs (#2288, #2429, #2555, #2543, #2544, #2597, #2623)
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General improvements (#2309, #2310, 2313, #2316, 2317, #2349, #2360, #2402, #2446, #2561, #2273, #2267, #2274, #2275, #2432, #2251, #2321, #1936, #2408, #2413, #2401, #2531, #2534, #2535, #2521, #2553, #2596)
Flower received many improvements under the hood, too many to list here.
Incompatible changes
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Remove support for Python 3.7 (#2280, #2299, #2304, #2306, #2355, #2356)
Python 3.7 support was deprecated in Flower 1.5, and this release removes support. Flower now requires Python 3.8.
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Remove experimental argument rest from start_client (#2324)
The (still experimental) argument rest was removed from start_client and start_numpy_client. Use transport="rest" to opt into the experimental REST API instead.