FedSoup: Improving Generalization and Personalization in Federated
  Learning via Selective Model Interpolation
Minghui Chen Meirui Jiang Qi Dou Zehua Wang Xiaoxiao Li
Cross-silo federated learning (FL) enables the development of machine
learning models on datasets distributed across data centers such as hospitals
and clinical research laboratories. However, recent research has found that
current FL algorithms face a trade-off between local and global performance
when confronted with distribution shifts. Specifically, personalized FL methods
have a tendency to overfit to local data, leading to a sharp valley in the
local model and inhibiting its ability to generalize to out-of-distribution
data. In this paper, we propose a novel federated model soup method (i.e.,
selective interpolation of model parameters) to optimize the trade-off between
local and global performance. Specifically, during the federated training
phase, each client maintains its own global model pool by monitoring the
performance of the interpolated model between the local and global models. This
allows us to alleviate overfitting and seek flat minima, which can
significantly improve the model's generalization performance. We evaluate our
method on retinal and pathological image classification tasks, and our proposed
method achieves significant improvements for out-of-distribution
generalization. Our code is available at https://github.com/ubc-tea/FedSoup.