Synthetic Data Aided Federated Learning Using Foundation Models

Abstract: In heterogeneous scenarios where the data distribution amongst the Federated Learning (FL) participants is Non-Independent and Identically distributed (Non-IID), FL suffers from the well known problem of data heterogeneity. This leads the performance of FL to be significantly degraded, as the global model tends to struggle to converge. To solve this problem, we propose Differentially Private Synthetic Data Aided Federated Learning Using Foundation Models (DPSDA-FL), a novel data augmentation strategy that aids in homogenizing the local data present on the clients' side. DPSDA-FL improves the training of the local models by leveraging differentially private synthetic data generated from foundation models. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by evaluating it on the benchmark image dataset: CIFAR-10. Our experimental results have shown that DPSDA-FL can improve class recall and classification accuracy of the global model by up to 26% and 9%, respectively, in FL with Non-IID issues.