Multi-Level Branched Regularization for Federated Learning

A critical challenge of federated learning is data heterogeneity and imbalance across clients, which leads to inconsistency between local networks and unstable convergence of global models. To alleviate the limitations, we propose a novel architectural regularization technique that constructs multiple auxiliary branches in each local model by grafting local and global subnetworks at several different levels and that learns the representations of the main pathway in the local model congruent to the auxiliary hybrid pathways via online knowledge distillation. The proposed technique is effective to robustify the global model even in the non-iid setting and is applicable to various federated learning frameworks conveniently without incurring extra communication costs. We perform comprehensive empirical studies and demonstrate remarkable performance gains in terms of accuracy and efficiency compared to existing methods. The source code is available at our project page.Comment: ICML 202

Learning to Optimize Domain Specific Normalization for Domain Generalization

We propose a simple but effective multi-source domain generalization technique based on deep neural networks by incorporating optimized normalization layers that are specific to individual domains. Our approach employs multiple normalization methods while learning separate affine parameters per domain. For each domain, the activations are normalized by a weighted average of multiple normalization statistics. The normalization statistics are kept track of separately for each normalization type if necessary. Specifically, we employ batch and instance normalizations in our implementation to identify the best combination of these two normalization methods in each domain. The optimized normalization layers are effective to enhance the generalizability of the learned model. We demonstrate the state-of-the-art accuracy of our algorithm in the standard domain generalization benchmarks, as well as viability to further tasks such as multi-source domain adaptation and domain generalization in the presence of label noise