FedLF: Layer-Wise Fair Federated Learning

Fairness has become an important concern in Federated Learning (FL). An unfair model that performs well for some clients while performing poorly for others can reduce the willingness of clients to participate. In this work, we identify a direct cause of unfairness in FL - the use of an unfair direction to update the global model, which favors some clients while conflicting with other clients’ gradients at the model and layer levels. To address these issues, we propose a layer-wise fair Federated Learning algorithm (FedLF). Firstly, we formulate a multi-objective optimization problem with an effective fair-driven objective for FL. A layer-wise fair direction is then calculated to mitigate the model and layer-level gradient conflicts and reduce the improvement bias. We further provide the theoretical analysis on how FedLF can improve fairness and guarantee convergence. Extensive experiments on different learning tasks and models demonstrate that FedLF outperforms the SOTA FL algorithms in terms of accuracy and fairness. The source code is available at https://github.com/zibinpan/FedLF.

Authors

• Zibin Pan The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen
• Chi Li
• Fangchen Yu The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen
• Shuyi Wang The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen The Shenzhen Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics for Society
• Haijin Wang The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen The Shenzhen Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics for Society
• Xiaoying Tang
• Junhua Zhao The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen The Shenzhen Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics for Society

Keywords

• ML: Applications
• ML: Distributed Machine Learning & Federated Learning
• PEAI: Bias, Fairness & Equity