Progressive Distribution Matching for Federated Semi-Supervised Learning

Abstract Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative learning from distributed data while preserving the privacy of participating clients. While supervised federated learning with labeled data has made notable strides and achieved success, federated semi-supervised learning (FSSL) lags in its progress. Existing works for FSSL heavily rely on fully-labeled clients, while ignoring the distribution of pseudo-labels generated from skewed unlabeled data. In this work, we offer empirical and theoretical insights into the challenges encountered when applying conventional semi-supervised algorithms in the federated regime. Specifically, we highlight how the inherent data heterogeneity in FSSL can exacerbate issues within the pseudo-labeling process. Motivated by these observations, we propose federated learning with progressive distribution matching (FedPDM) to regularize the distribution of pseudo-labels, aiming to progressively reshape it to align with the ground-truth distribution. The matching problem could be formulated as an optimal transport (OT) problem and efficiently solved by Sinkhorn-Knopp iteration. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the superiority of FedPDM on a variety of models and datasets compared with prior arts for FSSL.