Conditional Moment Alignment for Improved Generalization in Federated Learning

Abstract

In this work, we study model heterogeneous Federated Learning (FL) for classification where different clients have different model architectures. Unlike existing works on model heterogeneity, we neither require access to a public dataset nor do we impose constraints on the model architecture of clients and ensure that the clients' models and data are private. We prove a generalization result, that provides fundamental insights into the role of the representations in FL and propose a theoretically grounded algorithm \textbf{Fed}erated \textbf{C}onditional \textbf{M}oment \textbf{A}lignment (\pap) that aligns class conditional distributions of each client in the feature space.