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In this work, we explore the unique challenges---and opportunities---of unsupervised federated learning (FL). We develop and analyze a one-shot federated clustering scheme, k-FED, based on the widely-used Lloyd's method for k-means clustering. In contrast to many supervised problems, we show that the issue of statistical heterogeneity in federated networks can in fact benefit our analysis. We analyse k-FED under a center separation assumption and compare it to the best known requirements of its centralized counterpart. Our analysis shows that in heterogeneous regimes where the number of clusters per device (k') is smaller than the total number of clusters over the network k, ($$k' \le \sqrt{k}$$), we can use heterogeneity to our advantage---significantly weakening the cluster separation requirements for k-FED. From a practical viewpoint, k-FED also has many desirable properties: it requires only round of communication, can run asynchronously, and can handle partial participation or node/network failures. We motivate our analysis with experiments on common FL benchmarks, and highlight the practical utility of one-shot clustering through use-cases in personalized FL and device sampling. 

We categorize meta-learning evaluation into two settings: in-distribution [ID], in which the train and test tasks are sampled iid from the same underlying task distribution, and out-of-distribution [OOD], in which they are not. While most meta-learning theory and some FSL applications follow the ID setting, we identify that most existing few-shot classification benchmarks instead reflect OOD evaluation, as they use disjoint sets of train (base) and test (novel) classes for task generation. This discrepancy is problematic because -- as we show on numerous benchmarks -- meta-learning methods that perform better on existing OOD datasets may perform significantly worse in the ID setting. In addition, in the OOD setting, even though current FSL benchmarks seem befitting, our study highlights concerns in 1) reliably performing model selection for a given meta-learning method, and 2) consistently comparing the performance of different methods. To address these concerns, we provide suggestions on how to construct FSL benchmarks to allow for ID evaluation as well as more reliable OOD evaluation. Our work aims to inform the meta-learning community about the importance and distinction of ID vs. OOD evaluation, as well as the subtleties of OOD evaluation with current benchmarks. 

Fairness and robustness are two important concerns for federated learning systems. In this work, we identify that robustness to data and model poisoning attacks and fairness, measured as the uniformity of performance across devices, are competing constraints in statistically heterogeneous networks. To address these constraints, we propose employing a simple, general framework for personalized federated learning, Ditto, and develop a scalable solver for it. Theoretically, we analyze the ability of Ditto to achieve fairness and robustness simultaneously on a class of linear problems. Empirically, across a suite of federated datasets, we show that Ditto not only achieves competitive performance relative to recent personalization methods, but also enables more accurate, robust, and fair models relative to state-of-the-art fair or robust baselines.