Robust Asymmetric Heterogeneous Federated Learning with Corrupted Clients
It addresses data corruption and model heterogeneity in federated learning, which are critical for real-world deployment, but the approach appears incremental as it builds on existing contrastive learning and federated methods.
The paper tackles robust federated learning with model heterogeneity and data corruption by introducing the RAHFL framework, which uses diversity-enhanced supervised contrastive learning and asymmetric strategies, achieving effectiveness in challenging environments as shown in experiments.
This paper studies a challenging robust federated learning task with model heterogeneous and data corrupted clients, where the clients have different local model structures. Data corruption is unavoidable due to factors such as random noise, compression artifacts, or environmental conditions in real-world deployment, drastically crippling the entire federated system. To address these issues, this paper introduces a novel Robust Asymmetric Heterogeneous Federated Learning (RAHFL) framework. We propose a Diversity-enhanced supervised Contrastive Learning technique to enhance the resilience and adaptability of local models on various data corruption patterns. Its basic idea is to utilize complex augmented samples obtained by the mixed-data augmentation strategy for supervised contrastive learning, thereby enhancing the ability of the model to learn robust and diverse feature representations. Furthermore, we design an Asymmetric Heterogeneous Federated Learning strategy to resist corrupt feedback from external clients. The strategy allows clients to perform selective one-way learning during collaborative learning phase, enabling clients to refrain from incorporating lower-quality information from less robust or underperforming collaborators. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our approach in diverse, challenging federated learning environments. Our code and models are public available at https://github.com/FangXiuwen/RAHFL.