2023/10/02 by Debora Caldarola, Caldarola, Debora, Barbara Caputo +3
Computer Science · #Advanced Graph Neural Networks #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Machine Learning in Healthcare #Privacy-Preserving Technologies in Data
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2310.01366
openalex publication_date 2023/10/02 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Federated Learning (FL) aims to learn a global model from distributed users while protecting their privacy. However, when data are distributed heterogeneously the learning process becomes noisy, unstable, and biased towards the last seen clients' data, slowing down convergence. To address these issues and improve the robustness and generalization capabilities of the global model, we propose WIMA (Window-based Model Averaging). WIMA aggregates global models from different rounds using a window-based approach, effectively capturing knowledge from multiple users and reducing the bias from the last ones. By adopting a windowed view on the rounds, WIMA can be applied from the initial stages of training. Importantly, our method introduces no additional communication or client-side computation overhead. Our experiments demonstrate the robustness of WIMA against distribution shifts and bad client sampling, resulting in smoother and more stable learning trends. Additionally, WIMA can be easily integrated with state-of-the-art algorithms. We extensively evaluate our approach on standard FL benchmarks, demonstrating its effectiveness.