arXiv Machine Learning

Federated Learning for the Design of Parametric Insurance Indices under Heterogeneous Renewable Production Losses

arXiv:2601. 12178v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose a federated learning framework for the calibration of parametric insurance indices under heterogeneous renewable energy production losses.

arXiv AI
Jul 15

Constraint-Aware Aggregation for Federated Reinforcement Learning in Microgrid Energy Coordination

arXiv:2607. 12763v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Federated Reinforcement Learning (FedRL) enables coordination of distributed energy resources without sharing raw local data, but standard aggregation methods such as FedAvg do not account for system-level constraints, often leading to unsafe global behavior.

By Usman Haider, Karl Mason
arXiv Machine Learning
5d ago

Federated Targeted Maximum Likelihood Estimation

The paper introduces the first federated algorithm for Targeted Maximum Likelihood Estimation (TMLE), enabling hospitals, banks, or registries to perform TMLE without sharing individual data. Two frameworks—FedTMLE‑G, which aggregates local gradients, and FedTMLE‑L, which allows each institution to complete its own fluctuation fit—are presented, along with a finite‑precision communication protocol that keeps numerical targeting error negligible. The authors also discuss privacy implications, convergence bounds, and trade‑offs between institutional influence and sampling variability.

By Diyang Li, Fei Wang, Kyra Gan
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 15

Pathwise Individual Rationality in Federated Learning: A Mechanism-Architecture Co-Design

The paper investigates the trade‑off between the costs of participating in federated learning (privacy, communication, compute) and the potential gains in model performance, framing this as a game‑theoretic problem of individual rationality versus autarky. It shows that clients can remain below their local‑training baseline for many rounds and that simply capping per‑round contributions harms learning. The authors propose a new mechanism that provides short‑term participation guarantees and personalized model evaluation, demonstrating theoretically and empirically that clients can avoid short‑term losses without significantly harming overall performance, even under moderate heterogeneity.

By Amin Meghrazi, Srinivasan Parthasarathy, Andrew Perrault
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

Differentiated Aggregation to Improve Generalization in Federated Learning

The paper proposes a new federated learning approach called FedALS that reduces communication costs by varying aggregation frequencies across model layers. It derives tighter generalization bounds for one‑round and multi‑round federated learning, linking these bounds to local updates and data heterogeneity. Based on representation‑learning insights, the authors argue that infrequent aggregation of early layers and more frequent aggregation of final layers yields more generalizable models, especially in non‑iid settings, and demonstrate the method’s effectiveness experimentally.

By Peyman Gholami, Hulya Seferoglu
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 18

Learning Principal-Agent Contracts for Equitable Smallholder Carbon Farming under Moral Hazard and Adverse Selection

The paper investigates how a single pooled contract offered by an aggregator to heterogeneous smallholder farmers can be designed to maximize profit while addressing private adoption costs and unobserved effort over multiple seasons. Using a POMDP framework and reinforcement learning, the authors find that profit‑maximizing contracts disproportionately favor large farms, achieving 87.7% of possible adoption on large farms versus only 8.2% on smallholdings, largely due to higher measurement, reporting, and verification costs on smaller plots. The study suggests that adjusting MRV cost structures could reduce this disparity and help scale carbon farming to smallholders.

By Rishi Bharadwaj, Yadati Narahari
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 18

FedFIbOS: Fisher Importance based Optimal Submodelling for Heterogeneous Federated Learning

FedFIbOS introduces a Fisher‑importance based criterion for selecting submodel parameters in heterogeneous federated learning, addressing the lack of theoretical justification in prior heuristic methods. By deriving a Fisher‑weighted quadratic masking surrogate and showing that the raw Fisher top‑k rule satisfies this surrogate under a Fisher‑dominant ranking condition, the method preserves convergence guarantees while efficiently estimating Fisher scores from squared gradients. Experiments on CIFAR‑10, CIFAR‑100, and AGNews demonstrate that FedFIbOS outperforms state‑of‑the‑art approaches by roughly 10% in accuracy, especially under strong non‑IID heterogeneity.

By Yasmeen Afzal, Jeremiah D. Deng, Haibo Zhang
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 3

Grounded, Compute-Efficient LLM Policy Agents for Energy-Poverty Equity in Physically-Constrained Peer-to-Peer Energy Markets

The paper introduces EqGrid, a closed‑loop simulation that uses a low‑frequency, open‑weight LLM policy agent to set price, carbon limits, and subsidies for a community of empirically‑grounded household personas, while high‑frequency multi‑agent RL traders clear a continuous double auction on a physically constrained IEEE‑33‑bus grid. It demonstrates that the LLM can reduce energy‑poverty inequality—lowering the Gini of energy burden from 0.351 to 0.305 and mean burden by 28%—without increasing net grid cost, and that a compressed sub‑1B model retains 92–95% of this benefit at dramatically lower inference energy. The study also establishes a compute‑efficiency frontier and a decoupled‑safety design that eliminates grid violations. whyItMatters":"By showing that a lightweight LLM can effectively manage energy markets to reduce poverty and inequality while staying energy‑efficient, the work offers a practical, low‑carbon AI solution for humanitarian energy‑poverty interventions."

By Kunal Jadhav, Siddhesh More