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Towards Multi-level Fairness and Robustness on Federated Learning
Fengda Zhang · Kun Kuang · Yuxuan Liu · Long Chen · Jiaxun Lu · Yunfeng Shao · Fei Wu · Chao Wu · Jun Xiao

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in Spurious correlations, Invariance, and Stability (SCIS) »
Event URL: https://openreview.net/forum?id=1Gdr2I1c1X5 »

Federated learning (FL) has emerged as an important machine learning paradigm where a global model is trained based on the private data from distributed clients. However, federated model can be biased due to the spurious correlation or distribution shift over subpopulations, and it may disproportionately advantage or disadvantage some of the subpopulations, leading to the problem of unfarness and non-robustness. In this paper, we formulate the problem of multi-level fairness and robustness on FL to train a global model performing well on existing clients, different subgroups formed by sensitive attribute(s), and newly added clients at the same time. To solve this problem, we propose a unifed optimization objective from the view of federated uncertainty set with theoretical analyses. We also develop an effcient federated optimization algorithm named Federated Mirror Descent Ascent with Momentum Acceleration (FMDA-M) with convergence guarantee. Extensive experimental results show that FMDA-M outperforms the existing FL algorithms on multilevel fairness and robustness.

Keywords: Fairness · federated learning · robustness · Federated Optimization

Author Information

Fengda Zhang (Zhejiang University)
Kun Kuang (Zhejiang University)
Kun Kuang

Kun Kuang is an Associate Professor at the College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University. He received his Ph.D. in the Department of Computer Science and Technology at Tsinghua University in 2019. He was a visiting scholar with Prof. Susan Athey's Group at Stanford University. His main research interests include Causal Inference, Data Mining, and Causality Inspired Machine Learning. He has published over 70 papers in prestigious conferences and journals in data mining and machine learning, including TKDE, TPAMI, ICML, NeurIPS, KDD, ICDE, WWW, MM, DMKD, Engineering, etc. He received ACM SIGAI China Rising Star Award in 2022.

Yuxuan Liu (Zhejiang University)
Long Chen (Columbia University)
Jiaxun Lu (Huawei)
Yunfeng Shao (Huawei Noah's Ark Lab)
Fei Wu (Zhejiang University)
Chao Wu (Zhejiang University)
Jun Xiao (Zhejiang University)

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