GLOCALFAIR: Jointly Improving Global and Local Group Fairness in Federated Learning

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Meerza, Syed Irfan Ali, Liu, Luyang, Zhang, Jiaxin, Liu, Jian
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866914963043385344
author Meerza, Syed Irfan Ali
Liu, Luyang
Zhang, Jiaxin
Liu, Jian
author_facet Meerza, Syed Irfan Ali
Liu, Luyang
Zhang, Jiaxin
Liu, Jian
contents Federated learning (FL) has emerged as a prospective solution for collaboratively learning a shared model across clients without sacrificing their data privacy. However, the federated learned model tends to be biased against certain demographic groups (e.g., racial and gender groups) due to the inherent FL properties, such as data heterogeneity and party selection. Unlike centralized learning, mitigating bias in FL is particularly challenging as private training datasets and their sensitive attributes are typically not directly accessible. Most prior research in this field only focuses on global fairness while overlooking the local fairness of individual clients. Moreover, existing methods often require sensitive information about the client's local datasets to be shared, which is not desirable. To address these issues, we propose GLOCALFAIR, a client-server co-design fairness framework that can jointly improve global and local group fairness in FL without the need for sensitive statistics about the client's private datasets. Specifically, we utilize constrained optimization to enforce local fairness on the client side and adopt a fairness-aware clustering-based aggregation on the server to further ensure the global model fairness across different sensitive groups while maintaining high utility. Experiments on two image datasets and one tabular dataset with various state-of-the-art fairness baselines show that GLOCALFAIR can achieve enhanced fairness under both global and local data distributions while maintaining a good level of utility and client fairness.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2401_03562
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle GLOCALFAIR: Jointly Improving Global and Local Group Fairness in Federated Learning
Meerza, Syed Irfan Ali
Liu, Luyang
Zhang, Jiaxin
Liu, Jian
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computers and Society
Federated learning (FL) has emerged as a prospective solution for collaboratively learning a shared model across clients without sacrificing their data privacy. However, the federated learned model tends to be biased against certain demographic groups (e.g., racial and gender groups) due to the inherent FL properties, such as data heterogeneity and party selection. Unlike centralized learning, mitigating bias in FL is particularly challenging as private training datasets and their sensitive attributes are typically not directly accessible. Most prior research in this field only focuses on global fairness while overlooking the local fairness of individual clients. Moreover, existing methods often require sensitive information about the client's local datasets to be shared, which is not desirable. To address these issues, we propose GLOCALFAIR, a client-server co-design fairness framework that can jointly improve global and local group fairness in FL without the need for sensitive statistics about the client's private datasets. Specifically, we utilize constrained optimization to enforce local fairness on the client side and adopt a fairness-aware clustering-based aggregation on the server to further ensure the global model fairness across different sensitive groups while maintaining high utility. Experiments on two image datasets and one tabular dataset with various state-of-the-art fairness baselines show that GLOCALFAIR can achieve enhanced fairness under both global and local data distributions while maintaining a good level of utility and client fairness.
title GLOCALFAIR: Jointly Improving Global and Local Group Fairness in Federated Learning
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.03562