Privacy Preserving Bayesian Federated Learning in Heterogeneous Settings
Disha Makhija Joydeep Ghosh Nhat Ho
In several practical applications of federated learning (FL), the clients are
highly heterogeneous in terms of both their data and compute resources, and
therefore enforcing the same model architecture for each client is very
limiting. Moreover, the need for uncertainty quantification and data privacy
constraints are often particularly amplified for clients that have limited
local data. This paper presents a unified FL framework to simultaneously
address all these constraints and concerns, based on training customized local
Bayesian models that learn well even in the absence of large local datasets. A
Bayesian framework provides a natural way of incorporating supervision in the
form of prior distributions. We use priors in the functional (output) space of
the networks to facilitate collaboration across heterogeneous clients.
Moreover, formal differential privacy guarantees are provided for this
framework. Experiments on standard FL datasets demonstrate that our approach
outperforms strong baselines in both homogeneous and heterogeneous settings and
under strict privacy constraints, while also providing characterizations of
model uncertainties.