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Personalized Federated Learning via Variational Bayesian Inference

Machine Learning 2022-06-17 v1

Abstract

Federated learning faces huge challenges from model overfitting due to the lack of data and statistical diversity among clients. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a novel personalized federated learning method via Bayesian variational inference named pFedBayes. To alleviate the overfitting, weight uncertainty is introduced to neural networks for clients and the server. To achieve personalization, each client updates its local distribution parameters by balancing its construction error over private data and its KL divergence with global distribution from the server. Theoretical analysis gives an upper bound of averaged generalization error and illustrates that the convergence rate of the generalization error is minimax optimal up to a logarithmic factor. Experiments show that the proposed method outperforms other advanced personalized methods on personalized models, e.g., pFedBayes respectively outperforms other SOTA algorithms by 1.25%, 0.42% and 11.71% on MNIST, FMNIST and CIFAR-10 under non-i.i.d. limited data.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2206.07977,
  title  = {Personalized Federated Learning via Variational Bayesian Inference},
  author = {Xu Zhang and Yinchuan Li and Wenpeng Li and Kaiyang Guo and Yunfeng Shao},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2206.07977},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

accepted for publication in 39th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2022

R2 v1 2026-06-24T11:53:20.171Z