Bias-Eliminating Augmentation Learning for Debiased Federated Learning

Abstract

Learning models trained on biased datasets tend to observe correlations between categorical and undesirable features, which result in degraded performances. Most existing debiased learning models are designed for centralized machine learning, which cannot be directly applied to distributed settings like federated learning (FL), which collects data at distinct clients with privacy preserved. To tackle the challenging task of debiased federated learning, we present a novel FL framework of Bias-Eliminating Augmentation Learning (FedBEAL), which learns to deploy Bias-Eliminating Augmenters (BEA) for producing client-specific bias-conflicting samples at each client. Since the bias types or attributes are not known in advance, a unique learning strategy is presented to jointly train BEA with the proposed FL framework. Extensive image classification experiments on datasets with various bias types confirm the effectiveness and applicability of our FedBEAL, which performs favorably against state-of-the-art debiasing and FL methods for debiased FL.