Empowering Over-the-Air Personalized Federated Learning via RIS

Abstract: Over-the-air computation (AirComp) integrates analog communication with task-oriented computation, serving as a key enabling technique for communication-efficient federated learning (FL) over wireless networks. However, AirComp-enabled FL (AirFL) with a single global consensus model fails to address the data heterogeneity in real-life FL scenarios with non-independent and identically distributed local datasets. In this paper, we introduce reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) technology to enable efficient personalized AirFL, mitigating the data heterogeneity issue. First, we achieve statistical interference elimination across different clusters in the personalized AirFL framework via RIS phase shift configuration. Then, we propose two personalized aggregation schemes involving power control and denoising factor design from the perspectives of first- and second-order moments, respectively, to enhance the FL convergence. Numerical results validate the superior performance of our proposed schemes over existing baselines.