Towards Fair Federated Learning via Unbiased Feature Aggregation
Zeqing He, Zhibo Wang, Xiaowei Dong, Peng Sun, Ju Ren, Kui Ren · IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing · 2025
Federated learning (FL) is a distributed machine learning framework that enables multiple clients to collaboratively train models without raw data exchange. Prior studies on FL mainly focus on optimizing learning performance, enhancing privacy preservation, and improving attack resilience. However, little work studies how to mitigate the unfairness of federated trained models while unfair models would make discriminatory decisions toward certain groups or populations (e.g., favoring males over females), leading to serious ethical concerns. Thus, it is crucial to mitigate model unfairness in FL, yet challenging as this requires centralized access to each data point's fairness-sensitive information (e.g., race, gender), which is prohibited in FL. In this work, we propose a novel fair FL framework FedUFA, where the server can aggregate clients’ learned knowledge in an unbiased manner, to obtain fair and high-usability federated trained models. Specifically, to unearth the bias in clients’ local data and account for potentially heterogeneous local models, we propose a knowledge distillation-based FL scheme, where clients’ knowledge of learned features on a public dataset is amalgamated to the server for aggregation. We train an unbiased feature mapper at the server to remove fairness-sensitive latent features and extract fair representations from clients’ submitted raw features. In particular, we design an adversarial training method to train the mapper, which involves apredictoraiming to maximize the prediction accuracy on the FL task and adiscriminatorintending to help identify fairness-sensitive features. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of FedUFA.