# The Prospect of Enhancing Large-Scale Heterogeneous Federated Learning with Transformers

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.03945 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03945/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Aug 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.05629/) (2016)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [Deep Learning Face Attributes in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.7766/) (2014)
- [Advances and Open Problems in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04977/) (2019)
- [Federated Optimization in Heterogeneous Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.06127/) (2018)
- [Similarity of Neural Network Representations Revisited](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00414/) (2019)
- [Model-Contrastive Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16257/) (2021)
- [Do Vision Transformers See Like Convolutional Neural Networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08810/) (2021)
- [Ditto: Fair and Robust Federated Learning Through Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.04221/) (2020)
- [Towards Personalized Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00710/) (2021)
- [Axial-DeepLab: Stand-Alone Axial-Attention for Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07853/) (2020)
- [Three Approaches for Personalization with Applications to Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10619/) (2020)
- [Learning Deep Transformer Models for Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01787/) (2019)
- [Understanding Robustness of Transformers for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14586/) (2021)
- [Do Wide and Deep Networks Learn the Same Things? Uncovering How Neural Network Representations Vary with Width and Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.15327/) (2020)
- [FedBABU: Towards Enhanced Representation for Federated Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06042/) (2021)
- [Federated Learning for Open Banking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10749/) (2021)
- [FedALA: Adaptive Local Aggregation for Personalized Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.01197/) (2022)
- [Rethinking Architecture Design for Tackling Data Heterogeneity in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06047/) (2021)
- [HorNet: Efficient High-Order Spatial Interactions with Recursive Gated Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14284/) (2022)
- [Layer-wised Model Aggregation for Personalized Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03993/) (2022)
- [Differentially Private Secure Multi-Party Computation for Federated Learning in Financial Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05867/) (2020)
- [Multi-Resource Allocation for On-Device Distributed Federated Learning Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00481/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Federated Learning in Big Model Era: Domain-Specific Multimodal Large Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11217/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Federated learning (FL) addresses data privacy concerns by enabling collaborative training of AI models across distributed data owners. Wide adoption of FL faces the fundamental challenges of data heterogeneity and the large scale of data owners involved. In this paper, we investigate the prospect of Transformer-based FL models for achieving generalization and personalization in this setting. We conduct extensive comparative experiments involving FL with Transformers, ResNet, and personalized ResNet-based FL approaches under various scenarios. These experiments consider varying numbers of data owners to demonstrate Transformers' advantages over deep neural networks in large-scale heterogeneous FL tasks. In addition, we analyze the superior performance of Transformers by comparing the Centered Kernel Alignment (CKA) representation similarity across different layers and FL models to gain insight into the reasons behind their promising capabilities.