Advocating for the Silent: Enhancing Federated Generalization for Nonparticipating Clients

Federated learning (FL) has surged in prominence due to its capability of collaborative model training without direct data sharing. However, the vast disparity in local data distributions among clients, often termed the nonindependent identically distributed (Non-IID) challenge, poses a significant hurdle to FL's generalization efficacy. The scenario becomes even more complex when not all clients participate in the training process, a common occurrence due to unstable network connections or limited computational capacities. This can greatly complicate the assessment of the trained models' generalization abilities. While a plethora of recent studies has centered on the generalization gap pertaining to unseen data from participating clients with diverse distributions, the distinction between the training distributions of participating clients and the testing distributions of nonparticipating ones has been largely overlooked. In response, our paper unveils an information-theoretic generalization framework for FL. Specifically, it quantifies generalization errors by evaluating the information entropy of local distributions and discerning discrepancies across these distributions. Inspired by our deduced generalization bounds, we introduce a weighted aggregation approach and a duo of client selection strategies. These innovations are designed to strengthen FL's ability to generalize and thus ensure that trained models perform better on nonparticipating clients by incorporating a more diverse range of client data distributions. Our extensive empirical evaluations reaffirm the potency of our proposed methods, aligning seamlessly with our theoretical construct.