Robust Heterogeneous Federated Learning under Data Corruption

Model heterogeneous federated learning is a realistic and challenging problem. However, due to the limitations of data collection, storage, and transmission conditions, as well as the existence of free-rider participants, the clients may suffer from data corruption. This paper starts the first attempt to investigate the problem of data corruption in the model heterogeneous federated learning framework. We design a novel method named Augmented Heterogeneous Federated Learning (AugHFL), which consists of two stages: 1) In the local update stage, a corruption-robust data augmentation strategy is adopted to minimize the adverse effects of local corruption while enabling the models to learn rich local knowledge. 2) In the collaborative update stage, we design a robust re-weighted communication approach, which implements communication between heterogeneous models while mitigating corrupted knowledge transfer from others. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in coping with various corruption patterns in the model heterogeneous federated learning setting.