While federated learning traditionally aims to train a single global model across decentralized local datasets, one model may not always be ideal for all participating clients. Here we propose an alternative, where each client only federates with other relevant clients to obtain a stronger model per client-specific objectives. To achieve this personalization, rather than computing a single model average with constant weights for the entire federation as in traditional FL, we efficiently calculate optimal weighted model combinations for each client, based on figuring out how much a client can benefit from another's model. We do not assume knowledge of any underlying data distributions or client similarities, and allow each client to optimize for arbitrary target distributions of interest, enabling greater flexibility for personalization. We evaluate and characterize our method on a variety of federated settings, datasets, and degrees of local data heterogeneity. Our method outperforms existing alternatives, while also enabling new features for personalized FL such as transfer outside of local data distributions.
Investigation of the degree of personalization in federated learning algorithms has shown that only maximizing the performance of the global model will confine the capacity of the local models to personalize. In this paper, we advocate an adaptive personalized federated learning (APFL) algorithm, where each client will train their local models while contributing to the global model. We derive the generalization bound of mixture of local and global models, and find the optimal mixing parameter. We also propose a communication-efficient optimization method to collaboratively learn the personaliz…
The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；The University of Melbourne（墨尔本大学）
Federated learning (FL) is a decentralized and privacy-preserving machine learning technique in which a group of clients collaborate with a server to learn a global model without sharing clients' data. One challenge associated with FL is statistical diversity among clients, which restricts the global model from delivering good performance on each client's task. To address this, we propose an algorithm for personalized FL (pFedMe) using Moreau envelopes as clients' regularized loss functions, which help decouple personalized model optimization from the global model learning in a bi-level proble…
Simon Fraser University（西蒙弗雷泽大学）；McMaster University（麦克马斯特大学）；Huawei Technologies Canada（华为技术加拿大公司）
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 pe…
Duke University（杜克大学）；Alibaba DAMO Academy（阿里巴巴达摩院）
Federated learning is a popular distributed machine learning paradigm with enhanced privacy. Its primary goal is learning a global model that offers good performance for the participants as many as possible. The technology is rapidly advancing with many unsolved challenges, among which statistical heterogeneity (i.e., non-IID) and communication efficiency are two critical ones that hinder the development of federated learning. In this work, we propose LotteryFL -- a personalized and communication-efficient federated learning framework via exploiting the Lottery Ticket hypothesis. In LotteryFL,…
Federated learning (FL) can help promote data privacy by training a shared model in a de-centralized manner on the physical devices of clients. In the presence of highly heterogeneous distributions of local data, personalized FL strategy seeks to mitigate the potential client drift. In this paper, we present the group personalization approach for applications of FL in which there exist inherent partitions among clients that are significantly distinct. In our method, the global FL model is fine-tuned through another FL training process over each homogeneous group of clients, after which each gr…
Internet of Things (IoT) have widely penetrated in different aspects of modern life and many intelligent IoT services and applications are emerging. Recently, federated learning is proposed to train a globally shared model by exploiting a massive amount of user-generated data samples on IoT devices while preventing data leakage. However, the device, statistical and model heterogeneities inherent in the complex IoT environments pose great challenges to traditional federated learning, making it unsuitable to be directly deployed. In this article we advocate a personalized federated learning fram…
Federated learning is a distributed machine learning approach in which a single server and multiple clients collaboratively build machine learning models without sharing datasets on clients. A challenging issue of federated learning is data heterogeneity (i.e., data distributions may differ across clients). To cope with this issue, numerous federated learning methods aim at personalized federated learning and build optimized models for clients. Whereas existing studies empirically evaluated their own methods, the experimental settings (e.g., comparison methods, datasets, and client setting) in…
King Abdullah University of Science and Technology（阿卜杜拉国王科技大学）
In this work, we consider the optimization formulation of personalized federated learning recently introduced by Hanzely and Richtárik (2020) which was shown to give an alternative explanation to the workings of local {\tt SGD} methods. Our first contribution is establishing the first lower bounds for this formulation, for both the communication complexity and the local oracle complexity. Our second contribution is the design of several optimal methods matching these lower bounds in almost all regimes. These are the first provably optimal methods for personalized federated learning. Our optima…
Federated learning allows clients to collaboratively learn statistical models while keeping their data local. Federated learning was originally used to train a unique global model to be served to all clients, but this approach might be sub-optimal when clients' local data distributions are heterogeneous. In order to tackle this limitation, recent personalized federated learning methods train a separate model for each client while still leveraging the knowledge available at other clients. In this work, we exploit the ability of deep neural networks to extract high quality vectorial representati…
The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）；UC Santa Barbara（加州大学圣塔芭芭拉分校）
Federated Learning is an emerging learning paradigm that allows training models from samples distributed across a large network of clients while respecting privacy and communication restrictions. Despite its success, federated learning faces several challenges related to its decentralized nature. In this work, we develop a novel algorithmic procedure with theoretical speedup guarantees that simultaneously handles two of these hurdles, namely (i) data heterogeneity, i.e., data distributions can vary substantially across clients, and (ii) system heterogeneity, i.e., the computational power of th…
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；HUST（华中科技大学）
In recent years, personalized federated learning (pFL) has attracted increasing attention for its potential in dealing with statistical heterogeneity among clients. However, the state-of-the-art pFL methods rely on model parameters aggregation at the server side, which require all models to have the same structure and size, and thus limits the application for more heterogeneous scenarios. To deal with such model constraints, we exploit the potentials of heterogeneous model settings and propose a novel training framework to employ personalized models for different clients. Specifically, we form…
In federated learning, model personalization can be a very effective strategy to deal with heterogeneous training data across clients. We introduce WAFFLE (Weighted Averaging For Federated LEarning), a personalized collaborative machine learning algorithm that leverages stochastic control variates for faster convergence. WAFFLE uses the Euclidean distance between clients' updates to weigh their individual contributions and thus minimize the personalized model loss on the specific agent of interest. Through a series of experiments, we compare our new approach to two recent personalized federate…
Personalized federated learning is tasked with training machine learning models for multiple clients, each with its own data distribution. The goal is to train personalized models in a collaborative way while accounting for data disparities across clients and reducing communication costs. We propose a novel approach to this problem using hypernetworks, termed pFedHN for personalized Federated HyperNetworks. In this approach, a central hypernetwork model is trained to generate a set of models, one model for each client. This architecture provides effective parameter sharing across clients, whil…
Hypernetworks for Model-Heterogeneous Personalized Federated Learning
the Qingdao Institute of Software, College of Computer Science and Technology, China University of Petroleum (East China)（青岛软件研究所、计算机科学与技术学院、中国石油大学（华东））；the Shandong Key Laboratory of Intelligent Oil & Gas Industrial Software（山东省智能石油与天然气工业软件重点实验室）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Apple（苹果公司）
Federated learning enables the deployment of machine learning to problems for which centralized data collection is impractical. Adding differential privacy guarantees bounds on privacy while data are contributed to a global model. Adding personalization to federated learning introduces new challenges as we must account for preferences of individual users, where a data sample could have conflicting labels because one sub-population of users might view an input positively, but other sub-populations view the same input negatively. We present FedEmbed, a new approach to private federated learning …
Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology（蔚山科学技术院）；Kakao Enterprise（Kakao企业）
Due to the curse of statistical heterogeneity across clients, adopting a personalized federated learning method has become an essential choice for the successful deployment of federated learning-based services. Among diverse branches of personalization techniques, a model mixture-based personalization method is preferred as each client has their own personalized model as a result of federated learning. It usually requires a local model and a federated model, but this approach is either limited to partial parameter exchange or requires additional local updates, each of which is helpless to nove…
Convergence-Privacy-Fairness Trade-Off in Personalized Federated Learning
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；Macquarie University（麦考瑞大学）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼大学）；University of Manitoba（曼尼托巴大学）
Federated learning (FL for simplification) is a distributed machine learning technique that utilizes global servers and collaborative clients to achieve privacy-preserving global model training without direct data sharing. However, heterogeneous data problem, as one of FL's main problems, makes it difficult for the global model to perform effectively on each client's local data. Thus, personalized federated learning (PFL for simplification) aims to improve the performance of the model on local data as much as possible. Bayesian learning, where the parameters of the model are seen as random var…
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）
Facing the challenge of statistical diversity in client local data distribution, personalized federated learning (PFL) has become a growing research hotspot. Although the state-of-the-art methods with model similarity-based pairwise collaboration have achieved promising performance, they neglect the fact that model aggregation is essentially a collaboration process within the coalition, where the complex multiwise influences take place among clients. In this paper, we first apply Shapley value (SV) from coalition game theory into the PFL scenario. To measure the multiwise collaboration among a…
Federated learning (FL) is a new distributed machine learning framework that can achieve reliably collaborative training without collecting users' private data. However, due to FL's frequent communication and average aggregation strategy, they experience challenges scaling to statistical diversity data and large-scale models. In this paper, we propose a personalized FL framework, named Tensor Decomposition based Personalized Federated learning (TDPFed), in which we design a novel tensorized local model with tensorized linear layers and convolutional layers to reduce the communication cost. TDP…
Personalized federated learning (FL) facilitates collaborations between multiple clients to learn personalized models without sharing private data. The mechanism mitigates the statistical heterogeneity commonly encountered in the system, i.e., non-IID data over different clients. Existing personalized algorithms generally assume all clients volunteer for personalization. However, potential participants might still be reluctant to personalize models since they might not work well. In this case, clients choose to use the global model instead. To avoid making unrealistic assumptions, we introduce…
Intelligent fault diagnosis is essential to safe operation of machinery. However, due to scarce fault samples and data heterogeneity in field machinery, deep learning based diagnosis methods are prone to over-fitting with poor generalization ability. To solve the problem, this paper proposes a personalized federated learning framework, enabling multi-task fault diagnosis method across multiple factories in a privacypreserving manner. Firstly, rotating machines from different factories with similar vibration feature data are categorized into machine groups using a federated clustering method. T…
Personalized Federated Learning (PFL) aims to learn personalized models for each client based on the knowledge across all clients in a privacy-preserving manner. Existing PFL methods generally assume that the underlying global data across all clients are uniformly distributed without considering the long-tail distribution. The joint problem of data heterogeneity and long-tail distribution in the FL environment is more challenging and severely affects the performance of personalized models. In this paper, we propose a PFL method called Federated Learning with Adversarial Feature Augmentation (F…
South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；Eindhoven University of Technology（埃因霍温理工大学）；JD Explore Academy（京东探索研究院）
Federated learning (FL) is vulnerable to heterogeneously distributed data, since a common global model in FL may not adapt to the heterogeneous data distribution of each user. To counter this issue, personalized FL (PFL) was proposed to produce dedicated local models for each individual user. However, PFL is far from its maturity, because existing PFL solutions either demonstrate unsatisfactory generalization towards different model architectures or cost enormous extra computation and memory. In this work, we propose federated learning with personalized sparse mask (FedSpa), a novel PFL scheme…
Robust Decentralized Personalized Federated Learning via Prediction-Constrained Neighborhood Collaboration
Faculty of Applied Sciences, Macao Polytechnic University（澳门理工大学应用科学学院）；School of Engineering and Technology, Central Queensland University（中央昆士兰大学工程与技术学院）；School of Information and Communication Technology, Griffith University（格里菲斯大学信息与通信技术学院）
Personalized federated learning (FL) aims to train model(s) that can perform well for individual clients that are highly data and system heterogeneous. Most work in personalized FL, however, assumes using the same model architecture at all clients and increases the communication cost by sending/receiving models. This may not be feasible for realistic scenarios of FL. In practice, clients have highly heterogeneous system-capabilities and limited communication resources. In our work, we propose a personalized FL framework, PerFed-CKT, where clients can use heterogeneous model architectures and d…
Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；The University of Texas at Austin（得克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）
In Federated Learning, we aim to train models across multiple computing units (users), while users can only communicate with a common central server, without exchanging their data samples. This mechanism exploits the computational power of all users and allows users to obtain a richer model as their models are trained over a larger set of data points. However, this scheme only develops a common output for all the users, and, therefore, it does not adapt the model to each user. This is an important missing feature, especially given the heterogeneity of the underlying data distribution for vario…
Booth School of Business, The University of Chicago（芝加哥大学布斯商学院）；Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago（芝加哥丰田技术研究院）
We consider the problem of personalized federated learning when there are known cluster structures within users. An intuitive approach would be to regularize the parameters so that users in the same cluster share similar model weights. The distances between the clusters can then be regularized to reflect the similarity between different clusters of users. We develop an algorithm that allows each cluster to communicate independently and derive the convergence results. We study a hierarchical linear model to theoretically demonstrate that our approach outperforms agents learning independently an…
In Federated Learning (FL), the clients learn a single global model (FedAvg) through a central aggregator. In this setting, the non-IID distribution of the data across clients restricts the global FL model from delivering good performance on the local data of each client. Personalized FL aims to address this problem by finding a personalized model for each client. Recent works widely report the average personalized model accuracy on a particular data split of a dataset to evaluate the effectiveness of their methods. However, considering the multitude of personalization approaches proposed, it …
The Pennsylvania State University（宾夕法尼亚州立大学）；NEC Laboratories America（美国NEC实验室）；Florida International University（佛罗里达国际大学）；AWS AI Labs, Amazon（亚马逊AWS人工智能实验室）
Personalized Federated Learning (PFL) which collaboratively trains a federated model while considering local clients under privacy constraints has attracted much attention. Despite its popularity, it has been observed that existing PFL approaches result in sub-optimal solutions when the joint distribution among local clients diverges. To address this issue, we present Federated Modular Network (FedMN), a novel PFL approach that adaptively selects sub-modules from a module pool to assemble heterogeneous neural architectures for different clients. FedMN adopts a light-weighted routing hypernetwo…
Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院数学与系统科学研究院）；Noah’s Ark Lab, Huawei（华为诺亚方舟实验室）
Federated learning faces huge challenges from model overfitting due to the lack of data and statistical diversity among clients. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a novel personalized federated learning method via Bayesian variational inference named pFedBayes. To alleviate the overfitting, weight uncertainty is introduced to neural networks for clients and the server. To achieve personalization, each client updates its local distribution parameters by balancing its construction error over private data and its KL divergence with global distribution from the server. Theoretical a…
In real-world federated learning scenarios, participants could have their own personalized labels which are incompatible with those from other clients, due to using different label permutations or tackling completely different tasks or domains. However, most existing FL approaches cannot effectively tackle such extremely heterogeneous scenarios since they often assume that (1) all participants use a synchronized set of labels, and (2) they train on the same task from the same domain. In this work, to tackle these challenges, we introduce Factorized-FL, which allows to effectively tackle label-…
