Edge Devices Clustering for Federated Visual Classification: A Feature Norm Based Framework

Federated learning is a privacy-preserving distributed learning paradigm where multiple devices collaboratively train a model, which is applicable to edge computing environments. However, the non-IID data distributed in multiple devices degrades the performance of the federated model due to severe weight divergence. This paper presents a clustered federated learning framework named cFedFN for visual classification tasks in order to reduce the degradation. Especially, this framework introduces the computation of feature norm vectors in the local training process and divides the devices into multiple groups by the similarities of the data distributions to reduce the weight divergences for better performance. As a result, this framework gains better performance on non-IID data without leakage of the private raw data. Experiments on various visual classification datasets demonstrate the superiority of this framework over the state-of-the-art clustered federated learning frameworks.