In Federated Learning (FL), multiple clients collaborate to learn a shared model through a central server while keeping data decentralized. Personalized Federated Learning (PFL) further extends FL by learning a personalized model per client. In both FL and PFL, all clients participate in the training process and their labeled data are used for training. However, in reality, novel clients may wish to join a prediction service after it has been deployed, obtaining predictions for their own \textbf{unlabeled} data. Here, we introduce a new learning setup, On-Demand Unlabeled PFL (OD-PFL), where a system trained on a set of clients, needs to be later applied to novel unlabeled clients at inference time. We propose a novel approach to this problem, ODPFL-HN, which learns to produce a new model for the late-to-the-party client. Specifically, we train an encoder network that learns a representation for a client given its unlabeled data. That client representation is fed to a hypernetwork that generates a personalized model for that client. Evaluated on five benchmark datasets, we find that ODPFL-HN generalizes better than the current FL and PFL methods, especially when the novel client has a large shift from training clients. We also analyzed the generalization error for novel clients, and showed analytically and experimentally how novel clients can apply differential privacy.
Recently, lots of algorithms have been proposed for learning a fair classifier from decentralized data. However, many theoretical and algorithmic questions remain open. First, is federated learning necessary, i.e., can we simply train locally fair classifiers and aggregate them? In this work, we first propose a new theoretical framework, with which we demonstrate that federated learning can strictly boost model fairness compared with such non-federated algorithms. We then theoretically and empirically show that the performance tradeoff of FedAvg-based fair learning algorithms is strictly worse than that of a fair classifier trained on centralized data. To bridge this gap, we propose FedFB, a private fair learning algorithm on decentralized data. The key idea is to modify the FedAvg protocol so that it can effectively mimic the centralized fair learning. Our experimental results show that FedFB significantly outperforms existing approaches, sometimes matching the performance of the centrally trained model.
Federated learning (FL) is a promising approach to enable the future Internet of vehicles consisting of intelligent connected vehicles (ICVs) with powerful sensing, computing and communication capabilities. We consider a base station (BS) coordinating nearby ICVs to train a neural network in a collaborative yet distributed manner, in order to limit data traffic and privacy leakage. However, due to the mobility of vehicles, the connections between the BS and ICVs are short-lived, which affects the resource utilization of ICVs, and thus, the convergence speed of the training process. In this paper, we propose an accelerated FL-ICV framework, by optimizing the duration of each training round and the number of local iterations, for better convergence performance of FL. We propose a mobility-aware optimization algorithm called MOB-FL, which aims at maximizing the resource utilization of ICVs under short-lived wireless connections, so as to increase the convergence speed. Simulation results based on the beam selection and the trajectory prediction tasks verify the effectiveness of the proposed solution.
Since federated learning (FL) has been introduced as a decentralized learning technique with privacy preservation, statistical heterogeneity of distributed data stays the main obstacle to achieve robust performance and stable convergence in FL applications. Model personalization methods have been studied to overcome this problem. However, existing approaches are mainly under the prerequisite of fully labeled data, which is unrealistic in practice due to the requirement of expertise. The primary issue caused by partial-labeled condition is that, clients with deficient labeled data can suffer from unfair performance gain because they lack adequate insights of local distribution to customize the global model. To tackle this problem, 1) we propose a novel personalized semi-supervised learning paradigm which allows partial-labeled or unlabeled clients to seek labeling assistance from data-related clients (helper agents), thus to enhance their perception of local data; 2) based on this paradigm, we design an uncertainty-based data-relation metric to ensure that selected helpers can provide trustworthy pseudo labels instead of misleading the local training; 3) to mitigate the network overload introduced by helper searching, we further develop a helper selection protocol to achieve efficient communication with acceptable performance sacrifice. Experiments show that our proposed method can obtain superior performance and more stable convergence than other related works with partially labeled data, especially in highly heterogeneous setting.
We present a federated learning framework that is designed to robustly deliver good predictive performance across individual clients with heterogeneous data. The proposed approach hinges upon a superquantile-based learning objective that captures the tail statistics of the error distribution over heterogeneous clients. We present a stochastic training algorithm that interleaves differentially private client filtering with federated averaging steps. We prove finite time convergence guarantees for the algorithm: $O(1/\sqrt{T})$ in the nonconvex case in $T$ communication rounds and $O(\exp(-T/\kappa^{3/2}) + \kappa/T)$ in the strongly convex case with local condition number $\kappa$. Experimental results on benchmark datasets for federated learning demonstrate that our approach is competitive with classical ones in terms of average error and outperforms them in terms of tail statistics of the error.
Data heterogeneity across clients in federated learning (FL) settings is a widely acknowledged challenge. In response, personalized federated learning (PFL) emerged as a framework to curate local models for clients' tasks. In PFL, a common strategy is to develop local and global models jointly - the global model (for generalization) informs the local models, and the local models (for personalization) are aggregated to update the global model. A key observation is that if we can improve the generalization ability of local models, then we can improve the generalization of global models, which in turn builds better personalized models. In this work, we consider class imbalance, an overlooked type of data heterogeneity, in the classification setting. We propose FedNH, a novel method that improves the local models' performance for both personalization and generalization by combining the uniformity and semantics of class prototypes. FedNH initially distributes class prototypes uniformly in the latent space and smoothly infuses the class semantics into class prototypes. We show that imposing uniformity helps to combat prototype collapse while infusing class semantics improves local models. Extensive experiments were conducted on popular classification datasets under the cross-device setting. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness and stability of our method over recent works.
Traditional learning-based approaches to student modeling (e.g., predicting grades based on measured activities) generalize poorly to underrepresented/minority student groups due to biases in data availability. In this paper, we propose a Multi-Layer Personalized Federated Learning (MLPFL) methodology which optimizes inference accuracy over different layers of student grouping criteria, such as by course and by demographic subgroups within each course. In our approach, personalized models for individual student subgroups are derived from a global model, which is trained in a distributed fashion via meta-gradient updates that account for subgroup heterogeneity while preserving modeling commonalities that exist across the full dataset. To evaluate our methodology, we consider case studies of two popular downstream student modeling tasks, knowledge tracing and outcome prediction, which leverage multiple modalities of student behavior (e.g., visits to lecture videos and participation on forums) in model training. Experiments on three real-world datasets from online courses demonstrate that our approach obtains substantial improvements over existing student modeling baselines in terms of increasing the average and decreasing the variance of prediction quality across different student subgroups. Visual analysis of the resulting students' knowledge state embeddings confirm that our personalization methodology extracts activity patterns which cluster into different student subgroups, consistent with the performance enhancements we obtain over the baselines.
Federated learning (FL) has been proposed to protect data privacy and virtually assemble the isolated data silos by cooperatively training models among organizations without breaching privacy and security. However, FL faces heterogeneity from various aspects, including data space, statistical, and system heterogeneity. For example, collaborative organizations without conflict of interest often come from different areas and have heterogeneous data from different feature spaces. Participants may also want to train heterogeneous personalized local models due to non-IID and imbalanced data distribution and various resource-constrained devices. Therefore, heterogeneous FL is proposed to address the problem of heterogeneity in FL. In this survey, we comprehensively investigate the domain of heterogeneous FL in terms of data space, statistical, system, and model heterogeneity. We first give an overview of FL, including its definition and categorization. Then, We propose a precise taxonomy of heterogeneous FL settings for each type of heterogeneity according to the problem setting and learning objective. We also investigate the transfer learning methodologies to tackle the heterogeneity in FL. We further present the applications of heterogeneous FL. Finally, we highlight the challenges and opportunities and envision promising future research directions toward new framework design and trustworthy approaches.
Federated Learning (FL) is a decentralized machine-learning paradigm, in which a global server iteratively averages the model parameters of local users without accessing their data. User heterogeneity has imposed significant challenges to FL, which can incur drifted global models that are slow to converge. Knowledge Distillation has recently emerged to tackle this issue, by refining the server model using aggregated knowledge from heterogeneous users, other than directly averaging their model parameters. This approach, however, depends on a proxy dataset, making it impractical unless such a prerequisite is satisfied. Moreover, the ensemble knowledge is not fully utilized to guide local model learning, which may in turn affect the quality of the aggregated model. Inspired by the prior art, we propose a data-free knowledge distillation} approach to address heterogeneous FL, where the server learns a lightweight generator to ensemble user information in a data-free manner, which is then broadcasted to users, regulating local training using the learned knowledge as an inductive bias. Empirical studies powered by theoretical implications show that, our approach facilitates FL with better generalization performance using fewer communication rounds, compared with the state-of-the-art.
Federated learning enables multiple parties to collaboratively train a machine learning model without communicating their local data. A key challenge in federated learning is to handle the heterogeneity of local data distribution across parties. Although many studies have been proposed to address this challenge, we find that they fail to achieve high performance in image datasets with deep learning models. In this paper, we propose MOON: model-contrastive federated learning. MOON is a simple and effective federated learning framework. The key idea of MOON is to utilize the similarity between model representations to correct the local training of individual parties, i.e., conducting contrastive learning in model-level. Our extensive experiments show that MOON significantly outperforms the other state-of-the-art federated learning algorithms on various image classification tasks.
Non-IID data present a tough challenge for federated learning. In this paper, we explore a novel idea of facilitating pairwise collaborations between clients with similar data. We propose FedAMP, a new method employing federated attentive message passing to facilitate similar clients to collaborate more. We establish the convergence of FedAMP for both convex and non-convex models, and propose a heuristic method to further improve the performance of FedAMP when clients adopt deep neural networks as personalized models. Our extensive experiments on benchmark data sets demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed methods.