Population Normalization for Federated Learning

Abstract

Batch normalization (BN) is widely recognized as an essential method in training deep neural networks, facilitating convergence and enhancing model stability. However, in Federated Learning (FL) contexts, where training data are typically heterogeneous and clients often face resource constraints, the effectiveness of BN is considerably limited for two primary reasons. First, the population statistics, specifically the mean and variance of these heterogeneous datasets, vary substantially, resulting in inconsistent BN layers across client models, which ultimately drives these models to diverge further. Second, estimating statistics from a mini-batch is often imprecise since the batch size has to be small in resource-limited clients. This paper introduces Population Normalization, a novel technique for FL, in which the statistics are learned as trainable parameters rather than calculated from mini-batches as in BN. Thus, our normalization layers are homogeneous among the clients and the adverse impact of small batch size is eliminated as the model can be well-trained even when the batch size equals to one. To enhance the flexibility of our method in practical applications, we investigate the role of stochastic uncertainty in BN’s statistical estimation. When larger batch sizes are available, we demonstrate that injecting simple artificial noise can effectively mimic this stochastic uncertainty and improve the model’s generalization capability. Experimental results validate the efficacy of our approach across various FL tasks.