# Uncertainty Minimization for Personalized Federated Semi-Supervised Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.02438 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.02438/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 33 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 May 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.05629/) (2016)
- [Dropout as a Bayesian Approximation: Representing Model Uncertainty in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02142/) (2015)
- [Federated Optimization in Heterogeneous Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.06127/) (2018)
- [What Uncertainties Do We Need in Bayesian Deep Learning for Computer Vision?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04977/) (2017)
- [FixMatch: Simplifying Semi-Supervised Learning with Consistency and Confidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07685/) (2020)
- [Temporal Ensembling for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02242/) (2016)
- [Virtual Adversarial Training: A Regularization Method for Supervised and Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03976/) (2017)
- [Ensemble Distillation for Robust Model Fusion in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07242/) (2020)
- [Federated Multi-Task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.10467/) (2017)
- [Personalized Federated Learning with Moreau Envelopes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.08848/) (2020)
- [FedBN: Federated Learning on Non-IID Features via Local Batch Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.07623/) (2021)
- [Federated Learning Based on Dynamic Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.04263/) (2021)
- [Federated Learning with Personalization Layers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.00818/) (2019)
- [Clustered Federated Learning: Model-Agnostic Distributed Multi-Task Optimization under Privacy Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01991/) (2019)
- [Regularization With Stochastic Transformations and Perturbations for Deep Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04586/) (2016)
- [Bayesian Nonparametric Federated Learning of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12022/) (2019)
- [Data-Free Knowledge Distillation for Heterogeneous Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.10056/) (2021)
- [Adaptive Personalized Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13461/) (2020)
- [Think Locally, Act Globally: Federated Learning with Local and Global Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.01523/) (2020)
- [Three Approaches for Personalization with Applications to Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10619/) (2020)
- [Personalized Cross-Silo Federated Learning on Non-IID Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.03797/) (2020)
- [Learning with Pseudo-Ensembles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.4864/) (2014)
- [Federated learning with hierarchical clustering of local updates to improve training on non-IID data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11791/) (2020)
- [MedMNIST Classification Decathlon: A Lightweight AutoML Benchmark for Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.14925/) (2020)
- [SCAFFOLD: Stochastic Controlled Averaging for Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.06378/) (2019)
- [Federated Meta-Learning with Fast Convergence and Efficient Communication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.07876/) (2018)
- [Federated Semi-Supervised Learning with Inter-Client Consistency & Disjoint Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.12097/) (2020)
- [Siloed Federated Learning for Multi-Centric Histopathology Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.07424/) (2020)
- [Federated Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.02367/) (2020)
- [Federated Semi-supervised Medical Image Classification via Inter-client Relation Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08600/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Since federated learning (FL) has been introduced as a decentralized learning technique with privacy preservation, statistical heterogeneity of distributed data stays the main obstacle to achieve robust performance and stable convergence in FL applications. Model personalization methods have been studied to overcome this problem. However, existing approaches are mainly under the prerequisite of fully labeled data, which is unrealistic in practice due to the requirement of expertise. The primary issue caused by partial-labeled condition is that, clients with deficient labeled data can suffer from unfair performance gain because they lack adequate insights of local distribution to customize the global model. To tackle this problem, 1) we propose a novel personalized semi-supervised learning paradigm which allows partial-labeled or unlabeled clients to seek labeling assistance from data-related clients (helper agents), thus to enhance their perception of local data; 2) based on this paradigm, we design an uncertainty-based data-relation metric to ensure that selected helpers can provide trustworthy pseudo labels instead of misleading the local training; 3) to mitigate the network overload introduced by helper searching, we further develop a helper selection protocol to achieve efficient communication with acceptable performance sacrifice. Experiments show that our proposed method can obtain superior performance and more stable convergence than other related works with partially labeled data, especially in highly heterogeneous setting.