Rethinking the Starting Point: Collaborative Pre-Training for Federated Downstream Tasks

A few recent studies have shown the benefits of using centrally pre-trained models to initialize federated learning (FL). However, existing methods do not generalize well when faced with an arbitrary set of downstream FL tasks. Specifically, they often (i) achieve limited accuracy, especially with unseen downstream labels, and (ii) result in significant accuracy variance, failing to provide a balanced performance across clients. To address these challenges, we propose CoPreFL, a collaborative/distributed pre-training approach that robustly initializes for downstream FL tasks. CoPreFL leverages model-agnostic meta-learning (MAML) that tailors the global model to mimic heterogeneous and unseen FL scenarios, resulting in a pre-trained model that is rapidly adaptable to any FL task. Our MAML procedure integrates performance variance into the meta-objective function, balancing performance across clients rather than solely optimizing for accuracy. Extensive experiments show that CoPreFL significantly enhances average accuracy and reduces variance in arbitrary downstream FL tasks with unseen/seen labels, outperforming various pre-training baselines. Additionally, CoPreFL proves compatible with different well-known FL algorithms used in downstream tasks, boosting performance in each case.