Harmonizing Global and Local Class Imbalance for Federated Learning

Federated Learning (FL) is to collaboratively train a global model among distributed clients by iteratively aggregating their local updates without sharing their raw data, whereby the global modal can approximately converge to the centralized training way over a global dataset that composed of all local datasets (i.e., union of all users’ local data). However, in real-world scenarios, the distributions of the data classes are often imbalanced not only locally, but also in the global dataset, which severely deteriorate the FL performance due to the conflicting knowledge aggregation. Existing solutions for FL class imbalance either focus on the local data to regulate the training process or purely aim at the global datasets, which often fail to alleviate the class imbalance problem if there is mismatch between the local and global imbalance. Considering these limitations, this paper proposes a Global-Local Joint Learning method, namely GLJL, which simultaneously harmonizes the global and local class imbalance issue by jointly embedding the local and the global factors into each client’s loss function. Through extensive experiments over popular datasets with various class imbalance settings, we show that the proposed method can significantly improve the model accuracy over minority classes without sacrificing the accuracy of other classes.