Federated Learning with Taskonomy

Classical federated learning approaches incur significant performance degradation in the presence of non-IID client data. A possible direction to address this issue is forming clusters of clients with roughly IID data. We introduce federated learning with taskonomy (FLT) that generalizes this direction by learning the task-relatedness between clients for more efficient federated aggregation of heterogeneous data. In a one-off process, the server provides the clients with a pretrained encoder to compress their data into a latent representation, and transmit the signature of their data back to the server. The server then learns the task-relatedness among clients via manifold learning, and performs a generalization of federated averaging. We demonstrate that FLT not only outperforms the existing state-of-the-art baselines but also offers improved fairness across clients.