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What Python frameworks are used for federated learning research?

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Growing 110 pts 0 followers
Bearys Institute of Technology · Posted
Political Science & Governance

Background

I am a first-year PhD student in Chemical Engineering. My guide has asked me to apply for PMRF in the upcoming cycle.

I need to write the research proposal component (2 pages). My research is on biodegradable polymer membranes for water purification.

Questions:

  • What level of detail is expected in the technical approach section?
  • Should I include preliminary results even if they are from coursework projects?
  • How important is the societal impact section?
  • Is it okay to cite work from my own MTech thesis?

Any feedback from people who have successfully received PMRF would be invaluable.

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65 Replies

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Priya Nair · Accepted answer

I am in a very similar situation. Would you be willing to share the outline of your PMRF proposal? Not the content.just the section headings and approximate word allocation.

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Xena D'Souza Starting 25 pts · Accepted answer

For Zotero vs BibTeX management, I moved to Zotero + Better BibTeX 3 years ago and have not looked back.

My workflow:

  1. Zotero browser connector captures papers instantly from ArXiv, Google Scholar, ACM DL, IEEE Xplore
  2. Better BibTeX generates a clean .bib file that auto-updates whenever I add a paper
  3. Overleaf directly pulls from the .bib file via Dropbox sync

One tip: create a Zotero collection per paper/project. When you export the .bib, export only that collection to keep it clean.

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Replying to Xena D'Souza
Suresh Iyer · Accepted answer

This is really helpful context. One more question: for the ethics committee approval, does the institution where the data is collected or the institution where the analysis is performed need to be the primary ethics approver?

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Ganesh Menon Growing 140 pts · Accepted answer

Seconding the recommendation for Zotero. Game changer for managing references across multiple projects.

0
Hemant Patwa · Accepted answer

I found that writing a paper abstract first (before the paper) and then reverse-engineering the paper from the abstract helped with clarity enormously.

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Vikram Bhatia Active 420 pts · Accepted answer

Strongly agree with the point about choosing venues carefully. One paper in NeurIPS > five papers in obscure workshops.

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Asha Pillai Distinguished 880 pts · Accepted answer

Overleaf + GitHub integration is underrated. You get version control and collaboration in one place.

0
Replying to Asha Pillai
Chetan Jain Growing 100 pts · Accepted answer

This is a known issue with XLM-R on code-mixed data. The MuRIL preprint has a section specifically comparing these.

0
Prakash Iyer Distinguished 640 pts · Accepted answer

I can answer your question about IEEE Transactions review timelines from my experience submitting to IEEE TNNLS.

For Q1 IEEE journals, expect:

  • Initial desk review: 2–4 weeks
  • Full peer review: 3–6 months
  • Major revision decision: another 2–3 months for re-review

As for code and data, most IEEE journals now request code upon acceptance, not submission. Regarding your 2.3% improvement.that is borderline. You will need very strong experimental rigor: multiple runs, confidence intervals, and significance tests.

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Vikram Bhatia Active 420 pts · Accepted answer

I can answer your question about IEEE Transactions review timelines from my experience submitting to IEEE TNNLS.

For Q1 IEEE journals, expect:

  • Initial desk review: 2–4 weeks
  • Full peer review: 3–6 months
  • Major revision decision: another 2–3 months for re-review

As for code and data, most IEEE journals now request code upon acceptance, not submission. Regarding your 2.3% improvement.that is borderline. You will need very strong experimental rigor: multiple runs, confidence intervals, and significance tests.

0
Meghana Rao Growing 170 pts · Accepted answer

Highly recommend checking out the PMRF portal for the actual numbers.they update the stipend structure annually.

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Replying to Meghana Rao
Rajesh Kumar · Accepted answer

This is very reassuring. I was worried the null result would kill the paper but your framing around transparency and effect sizes makes a lot of sense.

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Replying to Meghana Rao
Chirag Mehta Starting 15 pts · Accepted answer

For longitudinal data with missing values, mixed-effects models handle this more gracefully than imputation in most cases.

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Replying to Meghana Rao
Amit Joshi Starting 15 pts · Accepted answer

CSIR-UGC NET preparation: past papers are the most important resource. Everything else is secondary.

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Bhavana Reddy Starting 30 pts · Accepted answer

The IEEE TPAMI turnaround in my case was 7 months for the first review. Plan accordingly.

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Replying to Bhavana Reddy
Lakshmi Devi Growing 75 pts · Accepted answer

Thank you for the honest take. This is the kind of answer I was looking for.not the sanitized version.

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Replying to Bhavana Reddy
Shiva Prasad Active 480 pts · Accepted answer

This is exactly what I needed. Thank you so much.I have been going back and forth on this for weeks and this clears it up completely.

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Quamar Ahmed Growing 65 pts · Accepted answer

As a senior faculty member (25 years in the system), I want to offer a different perspective. Yes, the pressures are real. But I have also seen the other side: students who produce excellent work, publish honestly, and build reputations over time. The system is imperfect but not entirely broken.

What has actually helped my students: choosing venues carefully (a few strong papers rather than many weak ones), developing genuine collaborations rather than transactional coauthorships.

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Ganesh Menon Growing 140 pts · Accepted answer

Could you clarify what you mean by results-blind review? I have heard of it but never understood how it works in practice. Wouldn't reviewers need to see results to evaluate whether the methodology is sound?

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Rohan Desai Distinguished 950 pts · Accepted answer

Respectfully, I think this framing misses the systemic dimension. Individual researchers cannot solve a collective action problem. If you submit to open-access journals and your colleague submits to Nature, your colleague gets the promotion. Until evaluation criteria change at the institutional level.which requires policy intervention.individual choices have minimal impact.

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Ishaan Verma Growing 60 pts · Accepted answer

Flower (flwr) is the most actively maintained and research-friendly federated learning framework right now. My group has been using it for 18 months on a healthcare project with 4 hospital sites.

Strengths:

  • Clean simulation API that lets you test on a single machine before deploying
  • Good support for custom aggregation strategies (FedProx, FedNova)
  • Active Discord community with quick responses from the maintainers

For non-IID data specifically, look at the FedProx strategy.it handles heterogeneous data distributions much better than FedAvg.

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Eshan Patil Growing 70 pts · Accepted answer

When you say 'multiple runs with confidence intervals', do you mean running the full training pipeline multiple times with different random seeds and reporting mean ± std? Or something more statistically rigorous?

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Deepa Krishnamurthy Distinguished 810 pts · Accepted answer

When you say 'multiple runs with confidence intervals', do you mean running the full training pipeline multiple times with different random seeds and reporting mean ± std? Or something more statistically rigorous?

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Replying to Deepa Krishnamurthy
Deepa Krishnamurthy Distinguished 810 pts · Accepted answer

Really appreciate you taking the time to write this out in detail. This is going straight into my research notes.

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Replying to Deepa Krishnamurthy
Rajesh Kumar · Accepted answer

Open access is the right direction but the APCs are prohibitively expensive for many Indian researchers without institutional funding.

0
Replying to Deepa Krishnamurthy
Ravi Patel Starting 25 pts · Accepted answer

I found that writing a paper abstract first (before the paper) and then reverse-engineering the paper from the abstract helped with clarity enormously.

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Chetan Jain Growing 100 pts · Accepted answer

The short answer: it depends heavily on the journal and field, but here is a general framework.

If your null result is well-powered and the hypothesis was reasonable: Absolutely publish it. Null results in well-designed studies are as valuable as positive results. Journals like PLOS ONE explicitly welcome them.

If your study is underpowered: Be transparent about it. Report effect sizes and confidence intervals, not just p-values. A small, underpowered study with honest reporting is still a contribution.

What kills papers is when limitations are obvious but the authors have not addressed them.

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Replying to Chetan Jain
Farhan Mirza · Accepted answer

This is really helpful context. One more question: for the ethics committee approval, does the institution where the data is collected or the institution where the analysis is performed need to be the primary ethics approver?

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Manish Tiwari Starting 10 pts · Accepted answer

The ethics review situation in Indian universities is actually more complex than most people realize.

There is no uniform national framework equivalent to the US Common Rule. Each institution has its own Institutional Ethics Committee (IEC) or Institutional Review Board (IRB).

For anonymous survey research with no identifiable data and no vulnerable populations: most Indian IECs would classify this as exempt, but 'exempt' still needs a formal determination from the IEC.it is not self-certifying.

My practical advice: go to your institution's research ethics office now, describe what you did, and request an exempt determination in writing. Better to have documentation than to discover the issue during thesis review.

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Tara Singh Starting 5 pts · Accepted answer

The Fulbright SoP is very different from a typical PhD SoP. It needs to focus on cultural exchange and diplomacy, not just research.

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Lalitha Mohan Active 230 pts · Accepted answer

Check whether your institution has a Springer/Elsevier waiver agreement.many NITs and IITs do.

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Jagdish Rawat · Accepted answer

The IEEE TPAMI turnaround in my case was 7 months for the first review. Plan accordingly.

0
Zara Hussain Growing 55 pts · Accepted answer

Open access is the right direction but the APCs are prohibitively expensive for many Indian researchers without institutional funding.

0
Replying to Zara Hussain
Bhavana Reddy Starting 30 pts · Accepted answer

Thank you! The reference to MuRIL is particularly useful.I had not considered it as an alternative to XLM-R for Indic languages.

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Replying to Zara Hussain
Fatima Sheikh Growing 95 pts · Accepted answer

Really appreciate you taking the time to write this out in detail. This is going straight into my research notes.

0
Preethi Anand Distinguished 690 pts · Accepted answer

Thank you for this detailed answer! A quick follow-up: when you mention cosine learning rate with warm-up, are you warming up the LoRA parameters specifically or the entire model including the frozen backbone?

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Replying to Preethi Anand
Revathi Chandrasekaran Active 410 pts · Accepted answer

Seconding the recommendation for Zotero. Game changer for managing references across multiple projects.

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Rohan Desai Distinguished 950 pts · Accepted answer

I think you are conflating two separate problems here. The publish-or-perish culture creates pressure, yes.but the solution is not to criticize researchers who are navigating an unfair system. The real problem is with evaluation committees who treat publication count as a proxy for research quality. Fix the evaluation, and the incentives change.

Also worth noting: open review has been implemented in some fields and has its own problems. It can disadvantage early-career researchers who fear retaliation from senior colleagues they have reviewed critically.

0
Rohan Desai Distinguished 950 pts · Accepted answer

Could you clarify what you mean by results-blind review? I have heard of it but never understood how it works in practice. Wouldn't reviewers need to see results to evaluate whether the methodology is sound?

0
Admin NITK · Accepted answer

Overleaf + GitHub integration is underrated. You get version control and collaboration in one place.

0
Meghana Rao Growing 170 pts · Accepted answer

This is really helpful context. One more question: for the ethics committee approval, does the institution where the data is collected or the institution where the analysis is performed need to be the primary ethics approver?

0
Aditya Sharma Starting 45 pts · Accepted answer

CSIR-UGC NET preparation: past papers are the most important resource. Everything else is secondary.

0
Amit Joshi Starting 15 pts · Accepted answer

The Fulbright SoP is very different from a typical PhD SoP. It needs to focus on cultural exchange and diplomacy, not just research.

0
Varsha Pillai Growing 60 pts · Accepted answer

The Fulbright SoP is very different from a typical PhD SoP. It needs to focus on cultural exchange and diplomacy, not just research.

0
Vikram Bhatia Active 420 pts · Accepted answer

I am in a very similar situation. Would you be willing to share the outline of your PMRF proposal? Not the content.just the section headings and approximate word allocation.

0
Sowmya Narayanan Active 310 pts · Accepted answer

I have successfully received PMRF (lateral entry, second year). Happy to share what worked in my proposal.

On the research proposal:

  • 60–70% technical approach, 30% context and impact
  • Preliminary results absolutely help. Coursework projects are fine if genuinely relevant
  • The societal impact section should be substantive.PMRF is a national initiative; reviewers want to see why this matters

On citations: Yes, cite your MTech thesis. Framing your PhD as an extension of prior work you did shows continuity of thought.

0
Replying to Sowmya Narayanan
test tester Growing 165 pts · Accepted answer

For longitudinal data with missing values, mixed-effects models handle this more gracefully than imputation in most cases.

0
Replying to Sowmya Narayanan
Royal Dsouza Starting 30 pts · Accepted answer

Strongly agree with the point about choosing venues carefully. One paper in NeurIPS > five papers in obscure workshops.

0
Hemant Patwa · Accepted answer

This question comes up a lot. The answer really depends on your specific field and what your committee values.

0
Jagdish Rawat · Accepted answer

The IEEE TPAMI turnaround in my case was 7 months for the first review. Plan accordingly.

0
Eshan Patil Growing 70 pts · Accepted answer

Could you clarify what you mean by results-blind review? I have heard of it but never understood how it works in practice. Wouldn't reviewers need to see results to evaluate whether the methodology is sound?

0
Geeta Rao · Accepted answer

Thank you for this detailed answer! A quick follow-up: when you mention cosine learning rate with warm-up, are you warming up the LoRA parameters specifically or the entire model including the frozen backbone?

0
Prakash Iyer Distinguished 640 pts · Accepted answer

This is a known issue with XLM-R on code-mixed data. The MuRIL preprint has a section specifically comparing these.

0
Sanjay Kumar Growing 145 pts · Accepted answer

I found that writing a paper abstract first (before the paper) and then reverse-engineering the paper from the abstract helped with clarity enormously.

0
Replying to Sanjay Kumar
Hema Suresh Starting 20 pts · Accepted answer

Much appreciated. I will restructure my proposal along these lines. The point about societal impact being substantive is something I would have gotten wrong.

0
Indira Balan · Accepted answer

Check whether your institution has a Springer/Elsevier waiver agreement.many NITs and IITs do.

0
Kiran Yadav Growing 130 pts · Accepted answer

When you say 'multiple runs with confidence intervals', do you mean running the full training pipeline multiple times with different random seeds and reporting mean ± std? Or something more statistically rigorous?

0
Hema Suresh Starting 20 pts · Accepted answer

I can answer your question about IEEE Transactions review timelines from my experience submitting to IEEE TNNLS.

For Q1 IEEE journals, expect:

  • Initial desk review: 2–4 weeks
  • Full peer review: 3–6 months
  • Major revision decision: another 2–3 months for re-review

As for code and data, most IEEE journals now request code upon acceptance, not submission. Regarding your 2.3% improvement.that is borderline. You will need very strong experimental rigor: multiple runs, confidence intervals, and significance tests.

0
Replying to Hema Suresh
Vikram Bhatia Active 420 pts · Accepted answer

This question comes up a lot. The answer really depends on your specific field and what your committee values.

0
Replying to Hema Suresh
Shiva Prasad Active 480 pts · Accepted answer

Open access is the right direction but the APCs are prohibitively expensive for many Indian researchers without institutional funding.

0
Disha Malhotra Starting 8 pts · Accepted answer

Great question.I went through something very similar in my second year.

The key insight for me was that LoRA is actually quite well-suited for NER tasks, especially in low-resource settings. I would recommend:

  1. Use LoRA with r=8 or r=16.don't go higher for 8K samples
  2. Apply LoRA to attention layers only, not the feed-forward layers
  3. Use a cosine learning rate schedule with warm-up (10% of steps)

For Telugu-English code-mixed NER specifically, you might also look at MuRIL.it is pretrained on Indian language data and often outperforms XLM-R on Indic tasks even with less fine-tuning data.

0
Replying to Disha Malhotra
Ravi Patel Starting 25 pts · Accepted answer

The IEEE TPAMI turnaround in my case was 7 months for the first review. Plan accordingly.

0
Replying to Disha Malhotra
Wajid Khan Growing 110 pts · Accepted answer

Just to make sure I understand the Zotero workflow correctly.is the .bib file synced to Overleaf automatically every time you add a new paper, or do you need to trigger an export manually?

0
Hema Suresh Starting 20 pts · Accepted answer

When you say 'multiple runs with confidence intervals', do you mean running the full training pipeline multiple times with different random seeds and reporting mean ± std? Or something more statistically rigorous?

0
Kavitha Subramanian Active 365 pts · Accepted answer

Overleaf + GitHub integration is underrated. You get version control and collaboration in one place.