Add Flower Baseline: TraceFL

Paper

Gill et al., 2023, "TraceFL: Interpretability-Driven Debugging in Federated Learning via Neuron Provenance", accepted at the 2025 IEEE/ACM 47th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). This baseline replicates key experiments from the paper, focusing on neuron-level provenance to identify client contributions in federated learning (FL) settings.

Link

https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.13632

Maybe give motivations about why the paper should be implemented as a baseline.

TraceFL introduces a novel interpretability framework for FL by tracing neuron-level contributions from clients to the global model's predictions. This approach addresses the challenge of attributing predictions to specific clients, which is crucial for debugging, accountability, and incentivization in FL systems. By integrating TraceFL as a Flower baseline, we provide researchers with a tool to analyze and understand client contributions, enhancing transparency and trust in FL deployments.

Is there something else you want to add?

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Implementation

To implement this baseline, it is recommended to do the following items in that order:

For first time contributors

• Read the first contribution doc
• Complete the Flower tutorial
• Read the Flower Baselines docs to get an overview:
  • How to use Flower Baselines
  • How to contribute a Flower Baseline

Prepare - understand the scope

• Read the paper linked above
• Decide which experiments you'd like to reproduce. The more the better!
• Follow the steps outlined in Add a new Flower Baseline.
• You can use as reference other baselines that the community merged following those steps.

Verify your implementation

• Follow the steps indicated in the EXTENDED_README.md that was created in your baseline directory
• Ensure your code reproduces the results for the experiments you chose
• Ensure your README.md is ready to be run by someone that is no familiar with your code. Are all step-by-step instructions clear?
• Ensure running the formatting and typing tests for your baseline runs without errors.
• Clone your repo on a new directory, follow the guide on your own README.md and verify everything runs.