Robust Federated Learning With Noisy and Heterogeneous Clients

Xiuwen Fang, Mang Ye; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2022, pp. 10072-10081

Model heterogeneous federated learning is a challenging task since each client independently designs its own model. Due to the annotation difficulty and free-riding participant issue, the local client usually contains unavoidable and varying noises, which cannot be effectively addressed by existing algorithms. This paper starts the first attempt to study a new and challenging robust federated learning problem with noisy and heterogeneous clients. We present a novel solution RHFL (Robust Heterogeneous Federated Learning), which simultaneously handles the label noise and performs federated learning in a single framework. It is featured in three aspects: (1) For the communication between heterogeneous models, we directly align the models feedback by utilizing public data, which does not require additional shared global models for collaboration. (2) For internal label noise, we apply a robust noise-tolerant loss function to reduce the negative effects. (3) For challenging noisy feedback from other participants, we design a novel client confidence re-weighting scheme, which adaptively assigns corresponding weights to each client in the collaborative learning stage. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our approach in reducing the negative effects of different noise rates/types under both model homogeneous and heterogeneous federated learning settings, consistently outperforming existing methods.