← Search

Christopher Brinton

14 accepted papers

2025

Asynchronous Federated Reinforcement Learning with Policy Gradient Updates: Algorithm Design and Convergence Analysis

ICLR 2025poster

To improve the efficiency of reinforcement learning (RL), we propose a novel asynchronous federated reinforcement learning (FedRL) framework termed AFedPG, which constructs a global model through collaboration among $N$ agents using policy gradient (PG) updates. To address the challenge of lagged po…

Cited by 19SourcePDFScholar
2025

Contextual Integrity in LLMs via Reasoning and Reinforcement Learning

NeurIPS 2025poster

As the era of autonomous agents making decisions on behalf of users unfolds, ensuring contextual integrity (CI) -- what is the appropriate information to share while carrying out a certain task -- becomes a central question to the field. We posit that CI demands a form of reasoning where the agent…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Decentralized Sporadic Federated Learning: A Unified Algorithmic Framework with Convergence Guarantees

ICLR 2025spotlight

Decentralized federated learning (DFL) captures FL settings where both (i) model updates and (ii) model aggregations are exclusively carried out by the clients without a central server. Existing DFL works have mostly focused on settings where clients conduct a fixed number of local updates between l…

2025

Enabling Differentially Private Federated Learning for Speech Recognition: Benchmarks, Adaptive Optimizers, and Gradient Clipping

NeurIPS 2025poster

While federated learning (FL) and differential privacy (DP) have been extensively studied, their application to automatic speech recognition (ASR) remains largely unexplored due to the challenges in training large transformer models. Specifically, large models further exacerbate issues in FL as they…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

LLMAP: LLM-Assisted Multi-Objective Route Planning with User Preferences

EMNLP 2025

The rise of large language models (LLMs) has made natural language-driven route planning an emerging research area that encompasses rich user objectives. Current research exhibits two distinct approaches: direct route planning using LLM-as-Agent and graph-based searching strategies. However, LLMs in

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

RCCDA: Adaptive Model Updates in the Presence of Concept Drift under a Constrained Resource Budget

NeurIPS 2025poster

Machine learning (ML) algorithms deployed in real-world environments are often faced with the challenge of adapting models to concept drift, where the task data distributions are shifting over time. The problem becomes even more difficult when model performance must be maintained under adherence to…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Unlocking the Potential of Model Calibration in Federated Learning

ICLR 2025poster

Over the past several years, various federated learning (FL) methodologies have been developed to improve model accuracy, a primary performance metric in machine learning. However, to utilize FL in practical decision-making scenarios, beyond considering accuracy, the trained model must also have a r…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2024

Hierarchical Federated Learning with Multi-Timescale Gradient Correction

NeurIPS 2024poster

While traditional federated learning (FL) typically focuses on a star topology where clients are directly connected to a central server, real-world distributed systems often exhibit hierarchical architectures. Hierarchical FL (HFL) has emerged as a promising solution to bridge this gap, leveraging a…

2023

Improved Communication Efficiency in Federated Natural Policy Gradient via ADMM-based Gradient Updates

NeurIPS 2023poster

Federated reinforcement learning (FedRL) enables agents to collaboratively train a global policy without sharing their individual data. However, high communication overhead remains a critical bottleneck, particularly for natural policy gradient (NPG) methods, which are second-order. To address this…

Cited by 33SourcePDFScholar
2023

Robust Non-Linear Feedback Coding via Power-Constrained Deep Learning

ICML 2023poster

The design of codes for feedback-enabled communications has been a long-standing open problem. Recent research on non-linear, deep learning-based coding schemes have demonstrated significant improvements in communication reliability over linear codes, but are still vulnerable to the presence of forw…

Cited by 10SourcePDFScholar
2023

StableFDG: Style and Attention Based Learning for Federated Domain Generalization

NeurIPS 2023poster

Traditional federated learning (FL) algorithms operate under the assumption that the data distributions at training (source domains) and testing (target domain) are the same. The fact that domain shifts often occur in practice necessitates equipping FL methods with a domain generalization (DG) capab…

Cited by 16SourcePDFScholar
2022

Can we Generalize and Distribute Private Representation Learning?

AISTATS 2022poster

We study the problem of learning representations that are private yet informative i.e., provide information about intended "ally" targets while hiding sensitive "adversary" attributes. We propose Exclusion-Inclusion Generative Adversarial Network (EIGAN), a generalized private representation learnin…

2022

Recycling Model Updates in Federated Learning: Are Gradient Subspaces Low-Rank?

ICLR 2022poster

In this paper, we question the rationale behind propagating large numbers of parameters through a distributed system during federated learning. We start by examining the rank characteristics of the subspace spanned by gradients (i.e., the gradient-space) in centralized model training, and observe th…