Federated Generative Learning with Foundation Models

Existing federated learning solutions focus on transmitting features, parameters or gadients between clients and server, which suffer from serious low-efficiency and privacy-leakage problems. Thanks to the emerging foundation generative models, we propose a novel federated learning framework, namely Federated Generative Learning, that transmits prompts associated with distributed training data between clients and server. The informative training data can be synthesized remotely based on received prompts containing little privacy and the foundation generative models. The new framework possesses multiple advantages, including improved communication efficiency, better resilience to distribution shift, substantial performance gains, and enhanced privacy protection, which are verified in extensive experiments on ImageNet and DomainNet datasets.