ProtoFL: Unsupervised Federated Learning via Prototypical Distillation

Abstract: Federated learning (FL) is a promising approach for enhancing data privacy preservation, particularly for authentication systems. However, limited round communications, scarce representation, and scalability pose significant challenges to its deployment, hindering its full potential. In this paper, we propose 'ProtoFL', Prototypical Representation Distillation based unsupervised Federated Learning to enhance the representation power of a global model and reduce round communication costs. Additionally, we introduce a local one-class classifier based on normalizing flows to improve performance with limited data. Our study represents the first investigation of using FL to improve one-class classification performance. We conduct extensive experiments on five widely used benchmarks, namely MNIST, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, ImageNet-30, and Keystroke-Dynamics, to demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed framework over previous methods in the literature.