How to Prevent the Poor Performance Clients for Personalized Federated Learning?

Personalized federated learning (pFL) collaboratively trains personalized models, which provides a customized model solution for individual clients in the presence of heterogeneous distributed local data. Although many recent studies have applied various algorithms to enhance personalization in pFL, they mainly focus on improving the performance from averaging or top perspective. However, part of the clients may fall into poor performance and are not clearly discussed. Therefore, how to prevent these poor clients should be considered critically. Intuitively, these poor clients may come from biased universal information shared with others. To address this issue, we propose a novel pFL strategy, called Personalize Locally, Generalize Universally (PLGU). PLGU generalizes the fine-grained universal information and moderates its biased performance by designing a Layer-Wised Sharpness Aware Minimization (LWSAM) algorithm while keeping the personalization local. Specifically, we embed our proposed PLGU strategy into two pFL schemes concluded in this paper: with/without a global model, and present the training procedures in detail. Through in-depth study, we show that the proposed PLGU strategy achieves competitive generalization bounds on both considered pFL schemes. Our extensive experimental results show that all the proposed PLGU based-algorithms achieve state-of-the-art performance.