FedNoRo: Towards Noise-Robust Federated Learning by Addressing Class Imbalance and Label Noise Heterogeneity

FedNoRo: Towards Noise-Robust Federated Learning by Addressing Class Imbalance and Label Noise Heterogeneity

Nannan Wu, Li Yu, Xuefeng Jiang, Kwang-Ting Cheng, Zengqiang Yan

Proceedings of the Thirty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 4424-4432. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2023/492

Federated noisy label learning (FNLL) is emerging as a promising tool for privacy-preserving multi-source decentralized learning. Existing research, relying on the assumption of class-balanced global data, might be incapable to model complicated label noise, especially in medical scenarios. In this paper, we first formulate a new and more realistic federated label noise problem where global data is class-imbalanced and label noise is heterogeneous, and then propose a two-stage framework named FedNoRo for noise-robust federated learning. Specifically, in the first stage of FedNoRo, per-class loss indicators followed by Gaussian Mixture Model are deployed for noisy client identification. In the second stage, knowledge distillation and a distance-aware aggregation function are jointly adopted for noise-robust federated model updating. Experimental results on the widely-used ICH and ISIC2019 datasets demonstrate the superiority of FedNoRo against the state-of-the-art FNLL methods for addressing class imbalance and label noise heterogeneity in real-world FL scenarios.
Keywords:
Machine Learning: ML: Federated learning
Machine Learning: ML: Classification
Machine Learning: ML: Robustness