FedL2G: Learning to Guide Local Training in Heterogeneous Federated Learning

Data and model heterogeneity are two core issues in Heterogeneous Federated Learning (HtFL). In scenarios with heterogeneous model architectures, aggregating model parameters becomes infeasible, leading to the use of prototypes (i.e., class representative feature vectors) for aggregation and guidance. However, they still experience a mismatch between the extra guiding objective and the client's original local objective when aligned with global prototypes. Thus, we propose a Federated Learning-to-Guide (FedL2G) method that adaptively learns to guide local training in a federated manner and ensures the extra guidance is beneficial to clients' original tasks. With theoretical guarantees, FedL2G efficiently implements the learning-to-guide process using only first-order derivatives w.r.t. model parameters and achieves a non-convex convergence rate of O(1/T). We conduct extensive experiments on two data heterogeneity and six model heterogeneity settings using 14 heterogeneous model architectures (e.g., CNNs and ViTs) to demonstrate FedL2G's superior performance compared to six counterparts.

FuseGen: PLM Fusion for Data-generation based Zero-shot Learning

Data generation-based zero-shot learning, although effective in training Small Task-specific Models (STMs) via synthetic datasets generated by Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs), is often limited by the low quality of such synthetic datasets. Previous solutions have primarily focused on single PLM settings, where synthetic datasets are typically restricted to specific sub-spaces and often deviate from real-world distributions, leading to severe distribution bias. To mitigate such bias, we propose FuseGen, a novel data generation-based zero-shot learning framework that introduces a new criteria for subset selection from synthetic datasets via utilizing multiple PLMs and trained STMs. The chosen subset provides in-context feedback to each PLM, enhancing dataset quality through iterative data generation. Trained STMs are then used for sample re-weighting as well, further improving data quality. Extensive experiments across diverse tasks demonstrate that FuseGen substantially outperforms existing methods, highly effective in boosting STM performance in a PLM-agnostic way. Code is provided in https://github.com/LindaLydia/FuseGen.

An Upload-Efficient Scheme for Transferring Knowledge From a Server-Side Pre-trained Generator to Clients in Heterogeneous Federated Learning

Heterogeneous Federated Learning (HtFL) enables collaborative learning on multiple clients with different model architectures while preserving privacy. Despite recent research progress, knowledge sharing in HtFL is still difficult due to data and model heterogeneity. To tackle this issue, we leverage the knowledge stored in pre-trained generators and propose a new upload-efficient knowledge transfer scheme called Federated Knowledge-Transfer Loop (FedKTL). Our FedKTL can produce client-task-related prototypical image-vector pairs via the generator's inference on the server. With these pairs, each client can transfer pre-existing knowledge from the generator to its local model through an additional supervised local task. We conduct extensive experiments on four datasets under two types of data heterogeneity with 14 kinds of models including CNNs and ViTs. Results show that our upload-efficient FedKTL surpasses seven state-of-the-art methods by up to 7.31% in accuracy. Moreover, our knowledge transfer scheme is applicable in scenarios with only one edge client. Code: https://github.com/TsingZ0/FedKTL

FedTGP: Trainable Global Prototypes with Adaptive-Margin-Enhanced Contrastive Learning for Data and Model Heterogeneity in Federated Learning

Recently, Heterogeneous Federated Learning (HtFL) has attracted attention due to its ability to support heterogeneous models and data. To reduce the high communication cost of transmitting model parameters, a major challenge in HtFL, prototype-based HtFL methods are proposed to solely share class representatives, a.k.a, prototypes, among heterogeneous clients while maintaining the privacy of clients' models. However, these prototypes are naively aggregated into global prototypes on the server using weighted averaging, resulting in suboptimal global knowledge which negatively impacts the performance of clients. To overcome this challenge, we introduce a novel HtFL approach called FedTGP, which leverages our Adaptive-margin-enhanced Contrastive Learning (ACL) to learn Trainable Global Prototypes (TGP) on the server. By incorporating ACL, our approach enhances prototype separability while preserving semantic meaning. Extensive experiments with twelve heterogeneous models demonstrate that our FedTGP surpasses state-of-the-art methods by up to 9.08% in accuracy while maintaining the communication and privacy advantages of prototype-based HtFL. Our code is available at https://github.com/TsingZ0/FedTGP.

PFLlib: Personalized Federated Learning Algorithm Library

Amid the ongoing advancements in Federated Learning (FL), a machine learning paradigm that allows collaborative learning with data privacy protection, personalized FL (pFL) has gained significant prominence as a research direction within the FL domain. Whereas traditional FL (tFL) focuses on jointly learning a global model, pFL aims to achieve a balance between the global and personalized objectives of each client in FL settings. To foster the pFL research community, we propose PFLlib, a comprehensive pFL algorithm library with an integrated evaluation platform. In PFLlib, We implement 34 state-of-the-art FL algorithms (including 7 classic tFL algorithms and 27 pFL algorithms) and provide various evaluation environments with three statistically heterogeneous scenarios and 14 datasets. At present, PFLlib has already gained 850 stars and 199 forks on GitHub.

Eliminating Domain Bias for Federated Learning in Representation Space

Recently, federated learning (FL) is popular for its privacy-preserving and collaborative learning abilities. However, under statistically heterogeneous scenarios, we observe that biased data domains on clients cause a representation bias phenomenon and further degenerate generic representations during local training, i.e., the representation degeneration phenomenon. To address these issues, we propose a general framework Domain Bias Eliminator (DBE) for FL. Our theoretical analysis reveals that DBE can promote bi-directional knowledge transfer between server and client, as it reduces the domain discrepancy between server and client in representation space. Besides, extensive experiments on four datasets show that DBE can greatly improve existing FL methods in both generalization and personalization abilities. The DBE-equipped FL method can outperform ten state-of-the-art personalized FL methods by a large margin. Our code is public at https://github.com/TsingZ0/DBE.

GPFL: Simultaneously Learning Global and Personalized Feature Information for Personalized Federated Learning

Federated Learning (FL) is popular for its privacy-preserving and collaborative learning capabilities. Recently, personalized FL (pFL) has received attention for its ability to address statistical heterogeneity and achieve personalization in FL. However, from the perspective of feature extraction, most existing pFL methods only focus on extracting global or personalized feature information during local training, which fails to meet the collaborative learning and personalization goals of pFL. To address this, we propose a new pFL method, named GPFL, to simultaneously learn global and personalized feature information on each client. We conduct extensive experiments on six datasets in three statistically heterogeneous settings and show the superiority of GPFL over ten state-of-the-art methods regarding effectiveness, scalability, fairness, stability, and privacy. Besides, GPFL mitigates overfitting and outperforms the baselines by up to 8.99% in accuracy.

FedCP: Separating Feature Information for Personalized Federated Learning via Conditional Policy

Recently, personalized federated learning (pFL) has attracted increasing attention in privacy protection, collaborative learning, and tackling statistical heterogeneity among clients, e.g., hospitals, mobile smartphones, etc. Most existing pFL methods focus on exploiting the global information and personalized information in the client-level model parameters while neglecting that data is the source of these two kinds of information. To address this, we propose the Federated Conditional Policy (FedCP) method, which generates a conditional policy for each sample to separate the global information and personalized information in its features and then processes them by a global head and a personalized head, respectively. FedCP is more fine-grained to consider personalization in a sample-specific manner than existing pFL methods. Extensive experiments in computer vision and natural language processing domains show that FedCP outperforms eleven state-of-the-art methods by up to 6.69%. Furthermore, FedCP maintains its superiority when some clients accidentally drop out, which frequently happens in mobile settings. Our code is public at https://github.com/TsingZ0/FedCP.

FedALA: Adaptive Local Aggregation for Personalized Federated Learning

A key challenge in federated learning (FL) is the statistical heterogeneity that impairs the generalization of the global model on each client. To address this, we propose a method Federated learning with Adaptive Local Aggregation (FedALA) by capturing the desired information in the global model for client models in personalized FL. The key component of FedALA is an Adaptive Local Aggregation (ALA) module, which can adaptively aggregate the downloaded global model and local model towards the local objective on each client to initialize the local model before training in each iteration. To evaluate the effectiveness of FedALA, we conduct extensive experiments with five benchmark datasets in computer vision and natural language processing domains. FedALA outperforms eleven state-of-the-art baselines by up to 3.27% in test accuracy. Furthermore, we also apply ALA module to other federated learning methods and achieve up to 24.19% improvement in test accuracy.

TLSAN: Time-aware Long- and Short-term Attention Network for Next-item Recommendation

Recently, deep neural networks are widely applied in recommender systems for their effectiveness in capturing/modeling users' preferences. Especially, the attention mechanism in deep learning enables recommender systems to incorporate various features in an adaptive way. Specifically, as for the next item recommendation task, we have the following three observations: 1) users' sequential behavior records aggregate at time positions ("time-aggregation"), 2) users have personalized taste that is related to the "time-aggregation" phenomenon ("personalized time-aggregation"), and 3) users' short-term interests play an important role in the next item prediction/recommendation. In this paper, we propose a new Time-aware Long- and Short-term Attention Network (TLSAN) to address those observations mentioned above. Specifically, TLSAN consists of two main components. Firstly, TLSAN models "personalized time-aggregation" and learn user-specific temporal taste via trainable personalized time position embeddings with category-aware correlations in long-term behaviors. Secondly, long- and short-term feature-wise attention layers are proposed to effectively capture users' long- and short-term preferences for accurate recommendation. Especially, the attention mechanism enables TLSAN to utilize users' preferences in an adaptive way, and its usage in long- and short-term layers enhances TLSAN's ability of dealing with sparse interaction data. Extensive experiments are conducted on Amazon datasets from different fields (also with different size), and the results show that TLSAN outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both capturing users' preferences and performing time-sensitive next-item recommendation.