Paper ID: 2404.08973

PraFFL: A Preference-Aware Scheme in Fair Federated Learning

Rongguang Ye, Wei-Bin Kou, Ming Tang

Fairness in federated learning has emerged as a critical concern, aiming to develop an unbiased model for any special group (e.g., male or female) of sensitive features. However, there is a trade-off between model performance and fairness, i.e., improving model fairness will decrease model performance. Existing approaches have characterized such a trade-off by introducing hyperparameters to quantify client's preferences for model fairness and model performance. Nevertheless, these approaches are limited to scenarios where each client has only a single pre-defined preference, and fail to work in practical systems where each client generally have multiple preferences. The key challenge is to design a method that allows the model to adapt to diverse preferences of each client in real time. To this end, we propose a Preference-aware scheme in Fair Federated Learning paradigm (called PraFFL) to generate preference-wise model in real time. PraFFL can adaptively adjust the model based on each client's preferences to meet their needs. We theoretically prove that PraFFL can offer the optimal model tailored to an arbitrary preference of each client, and show its linear convergence. Experimental results show that our proposed PraFFL outperforms five fair federated learning algorithms in terms of the model's capability of adapting to clients' different preferences.

Submitted: Apr 13, 2024