  Federated learning methods enable model training across distributed data
sources without data leaving their original locations and have gained
increasing interest in various fields. However, existing approaches are
limited, excluding many structured probabilistic models. We present a general
and elegant solution based on structured variational inference, widely used in
Bayesian machine learning, adapted for the federated setting. Additionally, we
provide a communication-efficient variant analogous to the canonical FedAvg
algorithm. The proposed algorithms' effectiveness is demonstrated, and their
performance is compared with hierarchical Bayesian neural networks and topic
models.
