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Collaborative Machine Intelligence

Project description

Advancing machine learning with collaborative models

As machine learning models grow more complex, their training becomes increasingly resource-heavy. Coupled with the ever-evolving nature of real-world data, models must continually adapt, often requiring a full retraining on new datasets. This approach drives up CO2 emissions, energy use, and consolidates progress within large industry players. With this in mind, the ERC-funded CollectiveMinds project will establish a collaborative network of specialised models that learn from one another, reducing the need for complete retraining. By decentralising knowledge and allowing independent updates, it promises more sustainable AI development. With applications in healthcare and scientific research, CollectiveMinds seeks to democratise machine learning, promoting cooperation and sustainability in an evolving world.

Objective

Machine learning models are growing larger and more complex, making training increasingly resource-demanding. Concurrently, our world, and hence the training data is perpetually evolving. This requires continual model updating or retraining to address changing training data. Presently, the most reliable course to handle such distribution shifts is to retrain models from scratch on new training data. This results in substantial resource usage, increased CO2 footprint, elevated energy consumption, and limits the decisive ML progress to large-scale industry players.

Imagine a world in which models help each other learn. When the data distribution changes, a complete retraining of models could be avoided if the new model could learn from the outdated one by using reliable and provably effective methods. Furthermore, the convention of relying on large, versatile monolithic models could then give way to a consortium of smaller specialized models, with each contributing its specific domain knowledge when needed. By encouraging this form of decentralization, we could reduce resource consumption as the individual components can be updated independently of each other.

Drawing on groundbreaking research in distributed ML model training, CollectiveMinds aspires to design adaptable ML models. These models can effectively manage updates in training data and task modifications, while also enabling efficient knowledge exchange across various models, thereby fostering widescale collaborative learning and constructing a sustainable framework for collaborative machine intelligence.

This initiative could revolutionize sectors like healthcare, where there is limited training data, and trustworthy AI that demands guarantees on data ownership and control. Furthermore, it could foster improved collaborative research within the realm of science. CollectiveMinds embodies a significant paradigm shift towards democratizing ML, focusing on cooperative intellectual efforts.

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Keywords

Programme(s)

Topic(s)

Funding Scheme

HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants

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Call for proposal

(opens in new window) ERC-2024-COG

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Host institution

CISPA - HELMHOLTZ-ZENTRUM FUR INFORMATIONSSICHERHEIT GGMBH
Net EU contribution
€ 2 000 000,00
Address
STUHLSATZENHAUS 5
66123 SAARBRUCKEN
Germany
Region
Berlin Berlin Berlin
Activity type
Research Organisations
Links
Total cost
€ 2 000 000,00

Beneficiaries (1)