Federated model with contrastive learning and adaptive control variates for human activity recognition

Abstract

Recent attention to privacy issues demands a communication-safe method for training human activity recognition (HAR) models on client activity data. Federated learning (FL) has become a compelling technique to facilitate model training between the server and clients while preserving data privacy. However, classical FL methods often assume independent and identically distributed (IID) data among clients. This assumption does not hold true in practical scenarios. Human activity in real-world scenarios varies, resulting in skewness where identical activities are executed uniquely across clients. This leads to local model objectives drifting away from the global model objective, thereby impeding overall convergence. To address this challenge, we propose FedCoad, a novel federated model leveraging contrastive learning with adaptive control variates to handle the skewness among HAR clients. Model contrastive learning minimizes the gap in representation between global and local models to help global model convergence. During local model updates, the adaptive control variates penalize the local model updates with respect to the model weight and the rate of change from the control variates update. Our experiments show that FedCoad outperforms state-of-the-art FL algorithms on HAR benchmark datasets.

Keywords

Federated learning (FL) / Human activity recognition (HAR) / Contrastive learning / Deep learning

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

Zhejiang University Press