Personalized federated learning based on multi-head attention algorithm

Federated Learning (FL) is an algorithm for the encrypted exchange of model parameters while ensuring the independence of participants. Classic federated learning does not take into account the correlation between features, nor does it take into account the data differences caused by the reasonable personalization of each client. Therefore, this paper proposes a personalized federated learning algorithm based on a multi-head attention mechanism. First, in order to improve the personalization of local models, attention mechanism is used to capture the relevance of local features. Then, when aggregating local models, the weight λ is generated for local models based on the differences between models, and finally aggregate them into a new global model. Finally, the multi-head attention is proposed to calculate the importance score of the global model parameters on the current local model, and assign it to the local model as the attention coefficient, so as to realize personalized federated learning. Through experiments on MNIST, SVHN and STL10 datasets, the validity of Personalized Federated Learning is verified, and the rationality of hyperparameter setting is discussed through visualizing results.