tff.federated_aggregate

Aggregates value from tff.CLIENTS to tff.SERVER.

tff.federated_aggregate(
    value, zero, accumulate, merge, report
) -> tff.Value

This generalized aggregation function admits multi-layered architectures that involve one or more intermediate stages to handle scalable aggregation across a very large number of participants.

The multi-stage aggregation process is defined as follows:

  • Clients are organized into groups. Within each group, a set of all the member constituents of value contributed by clients in the group are first reduced using reduction operator accumulate with zero as the zero in the algebra. If members of value are of type T, and zero (the result of reducing an empty set) is of type U, the reduction operator accumulate used at this stage should be of type (<U,T> -> U). The result of this stage is a set of items of type U, one item for each group of clients.

  • Next, the U-typed items generated by the preceding stage are merged using the binary commutative associative operator merge of type (<U,U> -> U). The result of this stage is a single top-level U that emerges at the root of the hierarchy at the tff.SERVER. Actual implementations may structure this step as a cascade of multiple layers.

  • Finally, the U-typed result of the reduction performed in the preceding stage is projected into the result value using report as the mapping function (for example, if the structures being merged consist of counters, this final step might include computing their ratios).

value A value of a TFF federated type placed at tff.CLIENTS to aggregate.
zero The zero of type U in the algebra of reduction operators, as described above.
accumulate The reduction operator to use in the first stage of the process. If value is of type {T}@CLIENTS, and zero is of type U, this operator should be of type (<U,T> -> U).
merge The reduction operator to employ in the second stage of the process. Must be of type (<U,U> -> U), where U is as defined above.
report The projection operator to use at the final stage of the process to compute the final result of aggregation. If the intended result to be returned by tff.federated_aggregate is of type R@SERVER, this operator must be of type (U -> R).

A representation on the tff.SERVER of the result of aggregating value using the multi-stage process described above.

TypeError If the arguments are not of the types specified above.