Trustworthy Personalized Bayesian Federated Learning via Posterior Fine-Tune

Performance degradation due to data heterogeneity and low output interpretability are the most significant challenges faced by federated learning in practical applications. Personalized federated learning diverges from traditional approaches, as it no longer seeks to train a single model, but instead tailors a unique personalized model for each client. However, previous work focused only on personalization from the perspective of neural network parameters and lack of robustness and interpretability. In this work, we establish a novel framework for personalized federated learning, incorporating Bayesian methodology which enhances the algorithm’s ability to quantify uncertainty. Furthermore, we introduce normalizing flow to achieve personalization from the parameter posterior perspective and theoretically analyze the impact of normalizing flow on out-of-distribution (OOD) detection for Bayesian neural networks. Finally, we evaluated our approach on heterogeneous datasets, and the experimental results indicate that the new algorithm not only improves accuracy but also outperforms the baseline significantly in OOD detection due to the reliable output of the Bayesian approach.