  Federated learning enables multiple decentralized clients to learn
collaboratively without sharing the local training data. However, the expensive
annotation cost to acquire data labels on local clients remains an obstacle in
utilizing local data. In this paper, we propose a federated active learning
paradigm to efficiently learn a global model with limited annotation budget
while protecting data privacy in a decentralized learning way. The main
challenge faced by federated active learning is the mismatch between the active
sampling goal of the global model on the server and that of the asynchronous
local clients. This becomes even more significant when data is distributed
non-IID across local clients. To address the aforementioned challenge, we
propose Knowledge-Aware Federated Active Learning (KAFAL), which consists of
Knowledge-Specialized Active Sampling (KSAS) and Knowledge-Compensatory
Federated Update (KCFU). KSAS is a novel active sampling method tailored for
the federated active learning problem. It deals with the mismatch challenge by
sampling actively based on the discrepancies between local and global models.
KSAS intensifies specialized knowledge in local clients, ensuring the sampled
data to be informative for both the local clients and the global model. KCFU,
in the meantime, deals with the client heterogeneity caused by limited data and
non-IID data distributions. It compensates for each client's ability in weak
classes by the assistance of the global model. Extensive experiments and
analyses are conducted to show the superiority of KSAS over the
state-of-the-art active learning methods and the efficiency of KCFU under the
federated active learning framework.
