Adaptive Latent-Space Constraints in Personalized Federated Learning
This work addresses data heterogeneity challenges in federated learning for decentralized systems, offering incremental enhancements to existing methods.
The paper tackled statistical heterogeneity in personalized federated learning by applying adaptive MMD measures to the Ditto framework, resulting in significant performance improvements across various tasks, especially with feature heterogeneity.
Federated learning (FL) is an effective and widely used approach to training deep learning models on decentralized datasets held by distinct clients. FL also strengthens both security and privacy protections for training data. Common challenges associated with statistical heterogeneity between distributed datasets have spurred significant interest in personalized FL (pFL) methods, where models combine aspects of global learning with local modeling specific to each client's unique characteristics. This work investigates the efficacy of theoretically supported, adaptive MMD measures in pFL, primarily focusing on the Ditto framework, a state-of-the-art technique for distributed data heterogeneity. The use of such measures significantly improves model performance across a variety of tasks, especially those with pronounced feature heterogeneity. Additional experiments demonstrate that such measures are directly applicable to other pFL techniques and yield similar improvements across a number of datasets. Finally, the results motivate the use of constraints tailored to the various kinds of heterogeneity expected in FL systems.