解决联邦学习中的属性偏差问题,提升模型在未知数据上的泛化能力。
Federated Deconfounding and Debiasing Learning for Out-of-Distribution Generalization
- 构建因果图分析推理路径,通过反向调整消除混杂因素影响。
- 生成反事实样本,使模型不再依赖背景信息进行预测,提升泛化性能。
- 适合关注联邦学习中公平性与鲁棒性提升的研究者和开发者。
联邦学习中的属性偏差通常导致本地模型因学习非因果关联而优化不一致,进而降低性能。现有方法或通过数据增强增加样本多样性,或通过知识蒸馏学习不变表示,但缺乏对推理路径的全面分析,且混杂因素干扰限制了效果。为此,我们提出联邦去混淆与去偏学习(FedDDL)方法:构建结构化因果图分析模型推理过程,实施反向调整以消除混杂路径。具体地,设计客户端内去混淆模块,针对视觉任务解耦背景与主体,生成反事实样本,建立背景与任意标签之间的联系,阻止模型利用背景推断标签;同时设计客户端间去偏模块,构建因果原型以减少原型中背景成分比例,并通过因果原型正则化弥合异构表示差异。在2个基准数据集上的大量实验表明,该方法显著增强模型对未见数据中主体的关注能力,平均比9种先进方法提升4.5%的Top-1准确率。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Attribute bias in federated learning (FL) typically leads local models to optimize inconsistently due to the learning of non-causal associations, resulting degraded performance. Existing methods either use data augmentation for increasing sample diversity or knowledge distillation for learning invariant representations to address this problem. However, they lack a comprehensive analysis of the inference paths, and the interference from confounding factors limits their performance. To address these limitations, we propose the \underline{Fed}erated \underline{D}econfounding and \underline{D}ebiasing \underline{L}earning (FedDDL) method. It constructs a structured causal graph to analyze the model inference process, and performs backdoor adjustment to eliminate confounding paths. Specifically, we design an intra-client deconfounding learning module for computer vision tasks to decouple background and objects, generating counterfactual samples that establish a connection between the background and any label, which stops the model from using the background to infer the label. Moreover, we design an inter-client debiasing learning module to construct causal prototypes to reduce the proportion of the background in prototype components. Notably, it bridges the gap between heterogeneous representations via causal prototypical regularization. Extensive experiments on 2 benchmarking datasets demonstrate that \methodname{} significantly enhances the model capability to focus on main objects in unseen data, leading to 4.5\% higher Top-1 Accuracy on average over 9 state-of-the-art existing methods.
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