PerFedSI: A framework for personalized federated learning with side information

With an ever-increasing number of smart edge devices with computation and communication constraints, Federated Learning (FL) is a promising paradigm for learning from distributed devices and their data. Typical approaches to FL aim to learn a single model that simultaneously performs well for all clients. But such an approach may be ineffective when the clients’ data distributions are heterogeneous. In these cases, we aim to learn personalized models for each client’s data yet still leverage shared information across clients. A critical avenue that may allow for such personalization is the presence of client-specific side information available to each client, such as client embeddings obtained from domain-specific knowledge, pre-trained models, or simply one-hot encodings. In this work, we propose a new FL framework for utilizing a general form of client-specific side information for personalized federated learning. We prove that incorporating side information can improve model performance for simplified multi-task linear regression and matrix completion problems. Further, we validate these results with image classification experiments on Omniglot, CIFAR-10, and CIFAR-100, revealing that proper use of side information can be beneficial for personalization.