# NVIDIA FLARE: Federated Learning from Simulation to Real-World

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.13291 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13291/

## Key facts

- Cited by 80 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Oct 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.05629/) (2016)
- [XGBoost: A Scalable Tree Boosting System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.02754/) (2016)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [Advances and Open Problems in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04977/) (2019)
- [Federated Optimization in Heterogeneous Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.06127/) (2018)
- [Deep Learning with Differential Privacy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.00133/) (2016)
- [Adaptive Federated Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00295/) (2020)
- [Towards a Unified View of Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04366/) (2021)
- [GPT Understands, Too](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10385/) (2021)
- [Inverting Gradients -- How easy is it to break privacy in federated learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.14053/) (2020)
- [Ditto: Fair and Robust Federated Learning Through Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.04221/) (2020)
- [The Future of Digital Health with Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08119/) (2020)
- [Federated Learning with Matched Averaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.06440/) (2020)
- [Flower: A Friendly Federated Learning Research Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.14390/) (2020)
- [FedML: A Research Library and Benchmark for Federated Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.13518/) (2020)
- [Distributed learning of deep neural network over multiple agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.06060/) (2018)
- [FetchSGD: Communication-Efficient Federated Learning with Sketching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07682/) (2020)
- [Privacy-preserving Federated Brain Tumour Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.00962/) (2019)
- [Multi-Institutional Deep Learning Modeling Without Sharing Patient Data: A Feasibility Study on Brain Tumor Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04304/) (2018)
- [Federated Learning for Breast Density Classification: A Real-World Implementation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.01871/) (2020)
- [OpenFL: An open-source framework for Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06413/) (2021)
- [IBM Federated Learning: an Enterprise Framework White Paper V0.1](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10987/) (2020)
- [Do Gradient Inversion Attacks Make Federated Learning Unsafe?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06924/) (2022)
- [Closing the Generalization Gap of Cross-silo Federated Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10144/) (2022)
- [FLUTE: A Scalable, Extensible Framework for High-Performance Federated Learning Simulations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13789/) (2022)
- [Auto-FedRL: Federated Hyperparameter Optimization for Multi-institutional Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06338/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 80)

- [FedML-HE: An Efficient Homomorphic-Encryption-Based Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10837/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Efficient Federated Learning Methods for Foundation Model Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04472/) (2024)
- [FS-Real: Towards Real-World Cross-Device Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13363/) (2023)
- [FedSecurity: Benchmarking Attacks and Defenses in Federated Learning and Federated LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04959/) (2023)
- [Advances in APPFL: A Comprehensive and Extensible Federated Learning Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11585/) (2024)
- [Decentralized Learning Made Easy with DecentralizePy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08322/) (2023)
- [Vertical Federated Learning: A Structured Literature Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00622/) (2022)
- [From Challenges and Pitfalls to Recommendations and Opportunities: Implementing Federated Learning in Healthcare](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.09727/) (2024)
- [The Federation Strikes Back: A Survey of Federated Learning Privacy Attacks, Defenses, Applications, and Policy Landscape](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.03636/) (2024)
- [Recent Methodological Advances in Federated Learning for Healthcare](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02874/) (2023)
- [Fed-BioMed: Open, Transparent and Trusted Federated Learning for Real-world Healthcare Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12012/) (2023)
- [Privacy Preserving Federated Learning in Medical Imaging with Uncertainty Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12815/) (2024)
- [pfl-research: simulation framework for accelerating research in Private Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06430/) (2024)
- [When Federated Learning meets Watermarking: A Comprehensive Overview of Techniques for Intellectual Property Protection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03573/) (2023)
- [Personalized and privacy-preserving federated heterogeneous medical image analysis with PPPML-HMI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11571/) (2023)
- [ConDistFL: Conditional Distillation for Federated Learning from Partially Annotated Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04070/) (2023)
- [Byzantine-Robust Federated Learning over Ring-All-Reduce Distributed Computing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.17392/) (2025)
- [Empowering Federated Learning for Massive Models with NVIDIA FLARE](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07792/) (2024)
- [APPFLx: Providing Privacy-Preserving Cross-Silo Federated Learning as a Service](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08786/) (2023)
- [Overcoming the Challenges of Batch Normalization in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14670/) (2024)
- [Exploring the Practicality of Federated Learning: A Survey Towards the Communication Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20431/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Privacy in Federated Learning: Secure Aggregation for Real-World Healthcare Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00974/) (2024)
- [Model-Agnostic Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04906/) (2023)
- [Towards Open Federated Learning Platforms: Survey and Vision from Technical and Legal Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02140/) (2023)
- [A Federated Learning Benchmark on Tabular Data: Comparing Tree-Based Models and Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.02074/) (2024)
- [Unity is Power: Semi-Asynchronous Collaborative Training of Large-Scale Models with Structured Pruning in Resource-Limited Clients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08457/) (2024)
- [Review of Mathematical Optimization in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01630/) (2024)
- [FL-APU: A Software Architecture to Ease Practical Implementation of Cross-Silo Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.19091/) (2025)
- [Don't Reach for the Stars: Rethinking Topology for Resilient Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05224/) (2025)
- [Research in Collaborative Learning Does Not Serve Cross-Silo Federated Learning in Practice](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12595/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Federated learning (FL) enables building robust and generalizable AI models by leveraging diverse datasets from multiple collaborators without centralizing the data. We created NVIDIA FLARE as an open-source software development kit (SDK) to make it easier for data scientists to use FL in their research and real-world applications. The SDK includes solutions for state-of-the-art FL algorithms and federated machine learning approaches, which facilitate building workflows for distributed learning across enterprises and enable platform developers to create a secure, privacy-preserving offering for multiparty collaboration utilizing homomorphic encryption or differential privacy. The SDK is a lightweight, flexible, and scalable Python package. It allows researchers to apply their data science workflows in any training libraries (PyTorch, TensorFlow, XGBoost, or even NumPy) in real-world FL settings. This paper introduces the key design principles of NVFlare and illustrates some use cases (e.g., COVID analysis) with customizable FL workflows that implement different privacy-preserving algorithms. Code is available at https://github.com/NVIDIA/NVFlare.