Federated Learning from Pre-Trained Models: A Contrastive Learning Approach

Excessive computation and communication demands pose challenges to current FL frameworks, especially when training large-scale models. To prevent these issues from hindering the deployment of FL systems, we propose a lightweight framework where clients jointly learn to fuse the representations generated by multiple fixed pre-trained models rather than training a large-scale model from scratch. To capture more client-specific and class-relevant information from the pre-trained models and jointly improve each client's ability to exploit those off-the-shelf models, we design a Federated Prototype-wise Contrastive Learning (FedPCL) approach which shares knowledge across clients through their class prototypes and builds client-specific representations in a prototype-wise contrastive manner. We perform a thorough evaluation of the proposed FedPCL in the lightweight framework, measuring its ability to fuse various pre-trained models on popular FL datasets.