Federated learning is an emerging research paradigm enabling collaborative training of machine learning models among different organizations while keeping data private at each institution. Despite recent progress, there remain fundamental challenges such as lack of convergence and potential for catastrophic forgetting in federated learning across real-world heterogeneous devices. In this paper, we demonstrate that attention-based architectures (e.g., Transformers) are fairly robust to distribution shifts and hence improve federated learning over heterogeneous data. Concretely, we conduct the first rigorous empirical investigation of different neural architectures across a range of federated algorithms, real-world benchmarks, and heterogeneous data splits. Our experiments show that simply replacing convolutional networks with Transformers can greatly reduce catastrophic forgetting of previous devices, accelerate convergence, and reach a better global model, especially when dealing with heterogeneous data. We will release our code and pretrained models at https://github.com/Liangqiong/ViT-FL-main to encourage future exploration in robust architectures as an alternative to current research efforts on the optimization front.

本文提出使用自注意力机制的神经网络模型（如Transformer），替代传统的卷积神经网络模型，以改进联邦学习中的模型性能和稳定性，尤其当处理异构数据的时候，可以大大降低模型遗忘和加快模型学习收敛速度。

面向联邦学习的数据异构化处理架构设计思考