FedCD: Personalized Federated Learning via Collaborative Distillation

Sabtain Ahmad, Atakan Aral

Abstract: Federated learning enables the creation of a centralized global model by aggregating updates from the locally trained models from multiple clients. While powerful, such an architecture is limited to applications where the needs of heterogeneous clients can be served by a single global model. It does not cater to the scenarios where each client independently designs its own model. Task and data heterogeneity inherent to such scenarios demand each client to specialize in the local setting while still being able to collaborate and transfer the acquired knowledge to the rest of the federation without sharing the data or the model. In this work, we utilize ensemble and collaborative learning to design a framework that enables the training of personalized models for heterogeneous clients with different learning capacities using federated learning. Empirical evaluations performed on the CIFAR100 dataset demonstrate that our framework is able to consistently improve the performance of all the participating models and outperform the independently trained models on the complete training set without collaboration. We analyze that all participants benefit from collaborative distillation and boast an average 1.4% increase in performance. Moreover, a comparison with the state-of-the-art approaches demonstrates that our framework outperforms the Federated Learning and Federation Distillation methods by up to a 2$\times$ increase in the average global accuracy.