Personalized Federated Learning with Inferred Collaboration Graphs

Personalized federated learning (FL) aims to collaboratively train a personalized model for each client. Previous methods do not adaptively determine who to collaborate at a fine-grained level, making them difficult to handle diverse data heterogeneity levels and those cases where malicious clients exist. To address this issue, our core idea is to learn a collaboration graph, which models the benefits from each pairwise collaboration and allocates appropriate collaboration strengths. Based on this, we propose a novel personalized FL algorithm, pFedGraph, which consists of two key modules: (1) inferring the collaboration graph based on pairwise model similarity and dataset size at server to promote fine-grained collaboration and (2) optimizing local model with the assistance of aggregated model at client to promote personalization. The advantage of pFedGraph is flexibly adaptive to diverse data heterogeneity levels and model poisoning attacks, as the proposed collaboration graph always pushes each client to collaborate more with similar and beneficial clients. Extensive experiments show that pFedGraph consistently outperforms the other $14$ baseline methods across various heterogeneity levels and multiple cases where malicious clients exist. Code will be available at https://github.com/MediaBrain-SJTU/pFedGraph.