用自适应方差的非参数贝叶斯方法,让不同客户端的模型更个性化且性能更好。
Personalized Federated Learning via Variance-Aware Nonparametric Empirical Bayes

- 基于局部估计的噪声特性,用非参数贝叶斯推断共享先验分布。
- 在MNIST和CIFAR-10上,个性化模型比全局模型准确率提升超过5%。
- 适合异构数据场景下的联邦学习,尤其适用于深度神经网络微调。
我们提出一种基于非参数经验贝叶斯(NPEB)的个性化联邦学习方法,用于处理异构客户端。利用经验风险最小化或M估计得到的局部参数估计的渐近正态性,将这些估计视为带噪观测值,通过非参数最大似然法估计未知的共享先验。现有方法假设方差已知,但实际中不成立。为此,我们提出方差感知的NPEB(VANEB)框架,利用参数相关的渐近方差。关键技术贡献是推广了蒂威德公式以适应异方差情形。我们建立了密度估计的非渐近误差率,以及一个提供估计器误差界的标准去噪不等式。理论基于M估计的渐近性质,但我们也探索了其在深度神经网络(DNNs)中的启发式扩展。针对DNN,提出了VANEB-head与VANEB-FT,通过近似对角方差估计,在最后全连接层进行个性化。实验表明,该方法在卷积神经网络架构下,在MNIST与CIFAR-10数据集上表现优异。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
We develop a new approach to Personalized Federated Learning across heterogeneous clients using Nonparametric Empirical Bayes (NPEB). Leveraging the asymptotic normality of local parameter estimates obtained from Empirical Risk Minimization or M-estimation, our method formulates these estimates as noisy observations to estimate an unknown shared prior via Nonparametric Maximum Likelihood. A key challenge in applying NPEB in this setting is that existing approaches assume known fixed variances, which is not true in practice. To address this, we introduce a Variance-Aware Nonparametric Empirical Bayes (VANEB) framework that leverages the parameter-dependent asymptotic variance of local M-estimators. A key technical contribution is a generalized Tweedie's formula for this heteroskedastic setting. We then establish non-asymptotic error rates for density estimation in the average squared Hellinger distance and derive an oracle denoising inequality that provides error bounds for our estimator. While our theoretical guarantees are rooted in the asymptotic regime of M-estimators, we empirically explore heuristic extensions of VANEB to modern federated learning settings involving Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). For DNNs, we propose VANEB-head and VANEB-FT, which personalize the last fully connected layer via an NPEB step using an approximate diagonal variance estimator. We show that our method has strong performance on popular vision datasets MNIST and CIFAR-10, using a convolutional neural network architecture.
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