Class Balanced Adaptive Pseudo Labeling for Federated Semi-Supervised Learning

Ming Li, Qingli Li, Yan Wang; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2023, pp. 16292-16301

This paper focuses on federated semi-supervised learning (FSSL), assuming that few clients have fully labeled data (labeled clients) and the training datasets in other clients are fully unlabeled (unlabeled clients). Existing methods attempt to deal with the challenges caused by not independent and identically distributed data (Non-IID) setting. Though methods such as sub-consensus models have been proposed, they usually adopt standard pseudo labeling or consistency regularization on unlabeled clients which can be easily influenced by imbalanced class distribution. Thus, problems in FSSL are still yet to be solved. To seek for a fundamental solution to this problem, we present Class Balanced Adaptive Pseudo Labeling (CBAFed), to study FSSL from the perspective of pseudo labeling. In CBAFed, the first key element is a fixed pseudo labeling strategy to handle the catastrophic forgetting problem, where we keep a fixed set by letting pass information of unlabeled data at the beginning of the unlabeled client training in each communication round. The second key element is that we design class balanced adaptive thresholds via considering the empirical distribution of all training data in local clients, to encourage a balanced training process. To make the model reach a better optimum, we further propose a residual weight connection in local supervised training and global model aggregation. Extensive experiments on five datasets demonstrate the superiority of CBAFed. Code will be released.