FedECCR: Federated Learning Method with Encoding Comparison and Classification Rectification

Federated learning is a distributed training method that integrates multi-party data information using privacy-preserving technologies through dispersed client data sets to jointly construct a global model under the coordination of a central server. However, in practical applications, there is a high degree of data distribution skewness among clients, which causes the optimization direction of the client models to diverge, resulting in model bias and reducing the accuracy of the global model. Existing methods require the calculation and transmission of much information to correct the optimization direction of the client models, or only roughly limit the deviation of the client models end-to-end, ignoring targeted processing of the internal structure of the model, resulting in unclear improvement effects. To address these problems, we propose a federated optimization algorithm FedECCR based on encoding contrast and classification correction. This algorithm divides the model into an encoder and a classifier. It utilizes prototype contrastive training of the model encoder and unbiased classification correction of the classifier. This approach notably improves the accuracy of the global model while maintaining low communication costs. We conducted experiments on multiple data sets to evaluate the validity of our method, and the quantified results showed that FedECCR can improve the global model classification accuracy by approximately 1% to 6% compared to FedAvg, FedProx, and MOON.