Demystifying Local and Global Fairness Trade-offs in Federated Learning Using Partial Information Decomposition

Abstract

This work presents an information-theoretic perspective to group fairness trade-offs in federated learning (FL) with respect to sensitive attributes, such as gender, race, etc. Existing works often focus on either $\textit{global fairness}$ (overall disparity of the model across all clients) or $\textit{local fairness}$ (disparity of the model at each client), without always considering their trade-offs. There is a lack of understanding regarding the interplay between global and local fairness in FL, particularly under data heterogeneity, and if and when one implies the other. To address this gap, we leverage a body of work in information theory called partial information decomposition (PID), which first identifies three sources of unfairness in FL, namely, $\textit{Unique Disparity}$, $\textit{Redundant Disparity}$, and $\textit{Masked Disparity}$. We demonstrate how these three disparities contribute to global and local fairness using canonical examples. This decomposition helps us derive fundamental limits on the trade-off between global and local fairness, highlighting where they agree or disagree. We introduce the $\textit{Accuracy and Global-Local Fairness Optimality Problem (AGLFOP)}$, a convex optimization that defines the theoretical limits of accuracy and fairness trade-offs, identifying the best possible performance any FL strategy can attain given a dataset and client distribution. We also present experimental results on synthetic datasets and the ADULT dataset to support our theoretical findings.