FedGroup: Ternary Cosine Similarity-based Clustered Federated Learning Framework toward High Accuracy in Heterogeneous Data

Federated Learning (FL) enables the multiple participating devices to collaboratively contribute to a global neural network model while keeping the training data locally. Unlike the centralized training setting, the non-IID and imbalanced (statistical heterogeneity) training data of FL is distributed in the federated network, which will increase the divergences between the local models and global model and further degrade the performance. In this paper, we propose a novel federated learning framework FedGroup based on a similarity-based clustering strategy, in which we 1) group the training of clients based on the similarities between the clients' optimize directions; 2) reduce the complexity of high-dimension low-sample size (HDLSS) parameter updates data clustering by decomposing the direction vectors to derive the ternary cosine similarity. FedGroup can achieve improvements by dividing joint optimization into groups of sub-optimization, and can be combined with FedProx, the state-of-the-art federated optimization algorithm. We evaluate FedGroup and FedGrouProx (combined with FedProx) on several open datasets. The experimental results show that our proposed frameworks significantly improving absolute test accuracy by +14.7% on FEMNIST compared to FedAvg, +5.4% on Sentiment140 compared to FedProx.