Virtual Homogeneity Learning: Defending against Data Heterogeneity in Federated Learning

Abstract

In federated learning (FL), model performance typically suffers from client drift induced by data heterogeneity, and mainstream works focus on correcting client drift. We propose a different approach named virtual homogeneity learning (VHL) to directly “rectify” the data heterogeneity. In particular, VHL conducts FL with a virtual homogeneous dataset crafted to satisfy two conditions: containing