Title
Rethinking Architecture Design for Tackling Data Heterogeneity in Federated Learning
Abstract
Federated learning is an emerging research paradigm enabling collaborative training of machine learning models among different organizations while keeping data private at each institution. Despite recent progress, there remain fundamental challenges such as the lack of convergence and the potential for catastrophic forgetting across real-world heterogeneous devices. In this paper, we demonstrate that self-attention-based architectures (e.g., Transformers) are more robust to distribution shifts and hence improve federated learning over heterogeneous data. Concretely, we conduct the first rigorous empirical investigation of different neural architectures across a range of federated algorithms, real-world benchmarks, and heterogeneous data splits. Our experiments show that simply replacing convolutional networks with Transformers can greatly reduce catastrophic forgetting of previous devices, accelerate convergence, and reach a better global model, especially when dealing with heterogeneous data. We release our code and pretrained models to encourage future exploration in robust architectures as an alternative to current research efforts on the optimization front.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1109/CVPR52688.2022.00982
IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Privacy and federated learning
Conference
2022
Issue
Citations 
PageRank 
1
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
8
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Liangqiong Qu100.68
Yuyin Zhou29710.94
Paul Pu Liang39411.96
Yingda Xia400.34
Feifei Wang500.34
Li Fei-Fei6224831135.90
Ehsan Adeli Mosabbeb726139.27
Daniel L. Rubin81645145.14