# GLOCALFAIR: Jointly Improving Global and Local Group Fairness in Federated Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.03562 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03562/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Jan 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.05629/) (2016)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [Advances and Open Problems in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04977/) (2019)
- [Equality of Opportunity in Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02413/) (2016)
- [LEAF: A Benchmark for Federated Settings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01097/) (2018)
- [Ditto: Fair and Robust Federated Learning Through Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.04221/) (2020)
- [Mitigating Unwanted Biases with Adversarial Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07593/) (2018)
- [The Future of Digital Health with Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08119/) (2020)
- [Federated Learning for Mobile Keyboard Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.03604/) (2018)
- [Agnostic Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00146/) (2019)
- [Age Progression/Regression by Conditional Adversarial Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08423/) (2017)
- [Fair Resource Allocation in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10497/) (2019)
- [FairFed: Enabling Group Fairness in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00857/) (2021)
- [Collaborative Fairness in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.12161/) (2020)
- [Fairness-aware Agnostic Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05057/) (2020)
- [Bias Mitigation Post-processing for Individual and Group Fairness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.06135/) (2018)
- [Mitigating Bias in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.02447/) (2020)
- [Addressing Algorithmic Disparity and Performance Inconsistency in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08435/) (2021)
- [Improving Fairness via Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.15545/) (2021)
- [Enforcing fairness in private federated learning via the modified method of differential multipliers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08604/) (2021)
- [Improving on-device speaker verification using federated learning with privacy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02651/) (2020)
- [Hierarchically Fair Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10386/) (2020)
- [Training Fair Models in Federated Learning without Data Privacy Infringement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05662/) (2021)
- [GIFAIR-FL: A Framework for Group and Individual Fairness in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02741/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [MM-OpenFGL: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Multimodal Federated Graph Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.22416/) (2026)
- [Friends in Unexpected Places: Enhancing Local Fairness in Federated Learning through Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.19331/) (2024)
- [Towards Group Fairness with Multiple Sensitive Attributes in Federated Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18732/) (2025)
- [Robust Server Defense Against Unreliable Clients in One-Shot Fair Collaborative Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.08616/) (2026)
- [Fairis: Fairness-Aware Aggregation with Provable Influence Containment against Fairness Poisoning Attacks in Collaborative Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.06469/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Federated learning (FL) has emerged as a prospective solution for collaboratively learning a shared model across clients without sacrificing their data privacy. However, the federated learned model tends to be biased against certain demographic groups (e.g., racial and gender groups) due to the inherent FL properties, such as data heterogeneity and party selection. Unlike centralized learning, mitigating bias in FL is particularly challenging as private training datasets and their sensitive attributes are typically not directly accessible. Most prior research in this field only focuses on global fairness while overlooking the local fairness of individual clients. Moreover, existing methods often require sensitive information about the client's local datasets to be shared, which is not desirable. To address these issues, we propose GLOCALFAIR, a client-server co-design fairness framework that can jointly improve global and local group fairness in FL without the need for sensitive statistics about the client's private datasets. Specifically, we utilize constrained optimization to enforce local fairness on the client side and adopt a fairness-aware clustering-based aggregation on the server to further ensure the global model fairness across different sensitive groups while maintaining high utility. Experiments on two image datasets and one tabular dataset with various state-of-the-art fairness baselines show that GLOCALFAIR can achieve enhanced fairness under both global and local data distributions while maintaining a good level of utility and client fairness.