Federated Learning with Fair Averaging

Abstract

Fairness has emerged as a critical problem in feder-ated learning (FL). In this work, we identify a cause of unfairness in FL conflicting gradients with large differences in the magnitudes. To address this issue, we propose the federated fair averaging(FedFV) algorithm to mitigate potential conflicts among clients before averaging their gradients. We first use the cosine similarity to detect gradient con-flicts, and then iteratively eliminate such conflictsby modifying both the direction and the magnitude of the gradients. We further show the theoretical foundation of FedFV to mitigate the issue conflicting gradients and converge to Pareto stationary so-lutions. Extensive experiments on a suite of federated datasets confirm that FedFV compares favorably against state-of-the-art methods in terms of fairness, accuracy and efficiency.

Publication
International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence