Class-Wise Adaptive Self Distillation for Federated Learning on Non-IID Data (Student Abstract)

Abstract

Federated learning (FL) enables multiple clients to collaboratively train a globally generalized model while keeping local data decentralized. A key challenge in FL is to handle the heterogeneity of data distributions among clients. The local model will shift the global feature when fitting local data, which results in forgetting the global knowledge. Following the idea of knowledge distillation, the global model's prediction can be utilized to help local models preserve the global knowledge in FL. However, when the global model hasn't converged completely, its predictions tend to be less reliable on certain classes, which may results in distillation's misleading of local models. In this paper, we propose a class-wise adaptive self distillation (FedCAD) mechanism to ameliorate this problem. We design class-wise adaptive terms to soften the influence of distillation loss according to the global model's performance on each class and therefore avoid the misleading. Experiments show that our method outperforms other state-of-the-art FL algorithms on benchmark datasets.