Replica tree-based federated learning using limited data

Abstract

Learning from limited data has been extensively studied in machine learning, considering that deep neural networks achieve optimal performance when trained using a large amount of samples. Although various strategies have been proposed for centralized training, the topic of federated learning with small datasets remains largely unexplored. Moreover, in realistic scenarios, such as settings where medical institutions are involved, the number of participating clients is also constrained. In this work, we propose a novel federated learning framework, named RepTreeFL. At the core of the solution is the concept of a replica, where we replicate each participating client by copying its model architecture and perturbing its local data distribution. Our approach enables learning from limited data and a small number of clients by aggregating a larger number of models with diverse data distributions. Furthermore, we leverage the hierarchical structure of the clients network (both original and virtual), alongside the model diversity across replicas, and introduce a diversity-based tree aggregation, where replicas are combined in a tree-like manner and the aggregation weights are dynamically updated based on the model discrepancy. We evaluated our method on two tasks and two types of data, graph generation and image classification (binary and multi-class), with both homogeneous and heterogeneous model architectures. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and outperformance of RepTreeFL in settings where both data and clients are limited.