# FedMD: Heterogenous Federated Learning via Model Distillation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.03581 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03581/

## Key facts

- Cited by 459 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 8 Oct 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 459)

- [Towards Personalized Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00710/) (2021)
- [Data-Free Knowledge Distillation for Heterogeneous Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.10056/) (2021)
- [FedProto: Federated Prototype Learning across Heterogeneous Clients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.00243/) (2021)
- [Federated Learning on Non-IID Data: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06843/) (2021)
- [Membership Inference Attacks on Machine Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07853/) (2021)
- [A Field Guide to Federated Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06917/) (2021)
- [FjORD: Fair and Accurate Federated Learning under heterogeneous targets with Ordered Dropout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.13451/) (2021)
- [FedKD: Communication Efficient Federated Learning via Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.13323/) (2021)
- [Heterogeneous Federated Learning: State-of-the-art and Research Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10616/) (2023)
- [Federated Learning for Open Banking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10749/) (2021)
- [Distributed Learning in Wireless Networks: Recent Progress and Future Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02151/) (2021)
- [Multi-Center Federated Learning: Clients Clustering for Better Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08647/) (2021)
- [Parameterized Knowledge Transfer for Personalized Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02862/) (2021)
- [DENSE: Data-Free One-Shot Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12371/) (2021)
- [Federated Learning for Generalization, Robustness, Fairness: A Survey and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.06750/) (2023)
- [Deep Model Fusion: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15698/) (2023)
- [Preservation of the Global Knowledge by Not-True Distillation in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03097/) (2021)
- [Multimodal Federated Learning via Contrastive Representation Ensemble](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08888/) (2023)
- [When Foundation Model Meets Federated Learning: Motivations, Challenges, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15546/) (2023)
- [On Large-Cohort Training for Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07820/) (2021)
- [FedAUX: Leveraging Unlabeled Auxiliary Data in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02514/) (2021)
- [Personalized Federated Learning through Local Memorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09360/) (2021)
- [FedGH: Heterogeneous Federated Learning with Generalized Global Header](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13137/) (2023)
- [Communication-Efficient Adaptive Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.02719/) (2022)
- [FedFed: Feature Distillation against Data Heterogeneity in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05077/) (2023)
- [Adapt to Adaptation: Learning Personalization for Cross-Silo Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08394/) (2021)
- [Virtual Homogeneity Learning: Defending against Data Heterogeneity in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02465/) (2022)
- [FedGEMS: Federated Learning of Larger Server Models via Selective Knowledge Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.11027/) (2021)
- [FedTGP: Trainable Global Prototypes with Adaptive-Margin-Enhanced Contrastive Learning for Data and Model Heterogeneity in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03230/) (2024)
- [Fusing Models with Complementary Expertise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01542/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Federated learning enables the creation of a powerful centralized model without compromising data privacy of multiple participants. While successful, it does not incorporate the case where each participant independently designs its own model. Due to intellectual property concerns and heterogeneous nature of tasks and data, this is a widespread requirement in applications of federated learning to areas such as health care and AI as a service. In this work, we use transfer learning and knowledge distillation to develop a universal framework that enables federated learning when each agent owns not only their private data, but also uniquely designed models. We test our framework on the MNIST/FEMNIST dataset and the CIFAR10/CIFAR100 dataset and observe fast improvement across all participating models. With 10 distinct participants, the final test accuracy of each model on average receives a 20% gain on top of what's possible without collaboration and is only a few percent lower than the performance each model would have obtained if all private datasets were pooled and made directly available for all participants.