PS-FedGAN: An Efficient Federated Learning Framework With Strong Data Privacy

Federated learning (FL) has emerged as an effective paradigm for distributed learning systems owing to its strong potential in exploiting underlying data characteristics while preserving data privacy. In cases of practical data heterogeneity among FL clients in many Internet of Things (IoT) applications over wireless networks, however, existing FL frameworks still face challenges in capturing the overall feature properties of local client data that often exhibit disparate distributions. One approach is to apply generative adversarial networks (GANs) in FL to address data heterogeneity by integrating GANs to regenerate anonymous training data without exposing original client data to possible eavesdropping. Despite some successes, existing GAN-based FL frameworks still incur high communication costs and elicit other privacy concerns, limiting their practical applications. To this end, this work proposes a novel FL framework that only applies partial GAN model sharing. This new partially shared federated GAN (PS-FedGAN) framework effectively addresses heterogeneous data distributions across clients and strengthens privacy preservation at reduced communication costs, especially over wireless networks. Our analysis demonstrates the convergence and privacy benefits of the proposed PS-FEdGAN framework. Through experimental results based on several well-known benchmark data sets, our proposed PS-FedGAN demonstrates strong potential to tackle FL under heterogeneous (nonindependent identically distributed) client data distributions, while improving data privacy and lowering communication overhead.