Federated Learning with Data-Agnostic Distribution Fusion

Federated learning has emerged as a promising distributed machine learning paradigm to preserve data privacy. One of the fundamental challenges of federated learning is that data samples across clients are usually not independent and identically distributed (non-IID), leading to slow convergence and severe performance drop of the aggregated global model. To facilitate model aggregation on non-IID data, it is desirable to infer the unknown global distributions without violating privacy protection policy. In this paper, we propose a novel data-agnostic distribution fusion based model aggregation method called FedFusion to optimize federated learning with non-IID local datasets, based on which the heterogeneous clients' data distributions can be represented by a global distribution of several virtual fusion components with different parameters and weights. We develop a Variational AutoEncoder (VAE) method to learn the optimal parameters of the distribution fusion components based on limited statistical information extracted from the local models, and apply the derived distribution fusion model to optimize federated model aggregation with non-IID data. Extensive experiments based on various federated learning scenarios with real-world datasets show that FedFusion achieves significant performance improvement compared to the state-of-the-art.