BSemiFL: Semi-supervised Federated Learning via a Bayesian Approach

Semi-supervised Federated Learning (SSFL) allows clients to collaboratively train a global model in the absence of their local data labels. The key step of SSFL is the re-labeling where each client adopts two types of available models, namely global and local models, to re-label the local data. While various technologies such as using the global model or the average of two models have been proposed to conduct the re-labeling step, little literature delves deeply into the performance dominance and limitations of the two models. This paper first theoretically and empirically demonstrate that the local model achieves higher re-labeling accuracy over local data while the global model can progressively improve the re-labeling performance by introducing the extra knowledge of other clients. Based on these, we propose BSemiFL which re-labels the local data via the collaboration between the local and global model in a Bayesian approach. Specifically, to re-label any given local sample, BSemiFL first uses Bayesian inference to assess the closeness of the local/global model to the sample. Then, it applies a weighted combination of their pseudo labels, using the closeness as the weights. Theoretical analysis shows that the labeling error of our method is smaller than that of simply using the global model, the local model, or their simple average. Experiments show that BSemiFL improves the performance by up to 9.8% as compared to existing methods.