Cross-Silo Feature Space Alignment for Federated Learning on Clients with Imbalanced Data

Data imbalance across clients in federated learning often leads to different local feature space partitions, harming the global model’s generalization ability. Existing methods either employ knowledge distillation to guide consistent local training or performs procedures to calibrate local models before aggregation. However, they overlook the ill-posed model aggregation caused by imbalanced representation learning. To address this issue, this paper presents a cross-silo feature space alignment method (FedFSA), which learns a unified feature space for clients to bridge inconsistency. Specifically, FedFSA consists of two modules, where the in-silo prototypical space learning (ISPSL) module uses predefined text embeddings to regularize representation learning, which can improve the distinguishability of representations on imbalanced data. Subsequently, it introduces a variance transfer approach to construct the prototypical space, which aids in calibrating minority classes feature distribution and provides necessary information for the cross-silo feature space alignment (CSFSA) module. Moreover, the CSFSA module utilizes augmented features learned from the ISPSL module to learn a generalized mapping and align these features from different sources into a common space, which mitigates the negative impact caused by imbalanced factors. Experimental results verified that FedFSA improves the consistency between diverse spaces on imbalanced data, which results in superior performance compared to existing methods.