Real-Time Decentralized knowledge Transfer at the Edge

Proliferation of edge networks creates islands of learning agents working on local streams of data. Transferring knowledge between these agents in real-time without exposing private data allows for collaboration to decrease learning time, and increase model confidence. Incorporating knowledge from data that was not seen by a local model creates an ability to debias a local model, or add to classification abilities on data never before seen. Transferring knowledge in a decentralized approach allows for models to retain their local insights, in turn allowing for local flavors of a machine learning model. This approach suits the decentralized architecture of edge networks, as a local edge node will serve a community of learning agents that will likely encounter similar data. We propose a method based on knowledge distillation for pairwise knowledge transfer pipelines, and compare to other popular knowledge transfer methods. Additionally, we test different scenarios of knowledge transfer network construction and show the practicality of our approach. Based on our experiments we show knowledge transfer using our model outperforms common methods in a real time transfer scenario.