Jul 2026· ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems· 0 citations· 45 references
TL;DR
This work proposes RAVEL-FCL, a generative replay-based framework for federated continual learning that integrates an improved generative model based on Rebooting ACGAN with multi-level feature alignment to ensure consistency and employs Elastic Variational Continual Learning on the server to probabilistically regularize the global model and preserve past knowledge.
Abstract
Federated learning is an emerging paradigm that addresses privacy concerns by training on decentralized data, but it faces significant performance challenges due to factors like non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) data and dynamic data distributions. These challenges are further amplified in federated class-incremental learning under realistic, non-monotonic class streams, where previously seen classes can intermittently reappear alongside new classes—making generative replay highly susceptible to training instability, mode collapse, and feature drift. To address these issues, we propose RAVEL-FCL, a generative replay-based framework for federated continual learning. Our approach integrates an improved generative model based on Rebooting ACGAN with multi-level feature alignment to ensure consistency, and employs Elastic Variational Continual Learning on the server to probabilistically regularize the global model and preserve past knowledge. Experimental evaluations show that our method achieves stable convergence and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on standard benchmarks—for example, it improves accuracy by 5.27% over FedCIL on EMNIST-Balanced and by 1.60% and 1.27% over the strongest baselines on TinyImageNet and ImageNet-LT, respectively—while maintaining a forgetting rate below 5% across tasks. By jointly addressing feature drift and catastrophic forgetting, RAVEL-FCL provides a robust and privacy-preserving solution suitable for the adaptive and autonomous systems envisioned for Industry 5.0.
This paper proposes Federated Learning with Consistency Optimization Algorithms (FedCO), a novel optimization framework that incorporates a label-skew-aware correction loss and neural feature distribution regularization during local training that significantly improves accuracy and convergence under diverse non-IID settings.
Ruiqi Wu, Yehong Li, Hongjie Guo et al.· Computers, Materials & C...· 0 citations
A novel FL framework is presented, FedPhoenix, that stochastically re-sets partial parameters in each round to destroy some features of the global model, guiding FL training to learn multiple generalized features for inference rather than specific overfitting features.
Jiahao Wu, Ming Hu, Yanxin Yang et al.· Advances in Neural Informati...· 1 citation
Federated fine-tuning of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) across distributed networks enables privacy-sensitive adaptation to evolving data streams, yet a fundamental obstacle prevents robust deployment in dynamic environments: catastrophic forgetting, wherein sequential task updates erase previously acquired knowledge across visual, linguistic, and cross-modal representations. Addressing this challenge is especially critical for autonomous networked AI operating in safety-sensitive domains, such as content moderation, where reliable retention of prior knowledge underpins system integrity. To overcome this, we propose Federated Continual Multimodal Learning (FedCMM), a framework that embeds continual-learning safeguards into the federated optimization loop at three complementary levels. At the parameter level, modality-aware elastic weight consolidation computes separate Fisher information matrices for the vision encoder, language backbone, and cross-modal projector, providing granular, asymmetry-aware protection against modality-specific forgetting. At the data level, each client trains a lightweight local generative replay module to synthesize raw-data-free embedding-level multimodal replay tuples without any raw data sharing. At the aggregation level, Task-similarity-aware gradient aggregation autonomously filters and reweights client updates by gradient cosine similarity, suppressing conflicting directions and stabilizing the global learning trajectory. Extensive experiments on two benchmarks demonstrate that FedCMM consistently outperforms recent baselines on accuracy and backward transfer, confirming that holistic, modality-aware optimization enables robust evolutive adaptation across heterogeneous networked AI deployments.
Jing Liu, Chenxuanyi Zou, Jiayang Ren et al.· 0 citations
Federated learning is appealing for privacy-sensitive network systems, yet its practical deployment remains hindered by the following three recurring challenges: (1) client drift under non-IID data, (2) vulnerability to corrupted updates, and (3) the communication cost of repeated model exchange. Most existing approaches address these issues in isolation. While analytically convenient, this separation often fails to reflect real-world conditions. For instance, defenses against poisoning may suppress useful updates, while personalization and compression can alter the aggregation geometry itself. In this paper, we study these effects jointly and propose URP-FL, a compact training framework that integrates reliability-aware aggregation, local regularization for drift control, and sparse client uploads. We provide theoretical analysis establishing a convergence bound with distinct terms capturing optimization error, data heterogeneity, and adversarial impact. Experiments on a non-IID image classification benchmark with sign-flip and label-flip attacks demonstrate the benefits of the unified design. Compared to FedAvg and FedProx, this URP-FL maintains accuracy under attack while reducing transmitted parameters by approximately 75%. Rather than presenting a production ready system, it offers a reproducible and technically coherent step toward federated learning that is more robust under realistic conditions.
Hua Kun, Wei Wang· 2026 International Conferenc...· 0 citations
FuGuard is proposed, a dual-strategy federated unlearning framework, designed for efficient and ideal client-level data removal that combines the generative surrogate, which approximates the contribution of the target client, with optimal transport regularization that softly constrains model parameter drift during unlearning.
Pian Qi, Daniela Annunziata, Chiara Jappelli et al.· IEEE Transactions on Neural...· 0 citations
In federated learning (FL), client data often suffer from the challenges of data distribution imbalance such as Non-IID and noisy labels. Crucially, these two issues are highly coupled and mutually exacerbating: Non-IID data complicates the identification of noisy labels, while noisy labels severely amplify local model drift. The compounding effect leads to severe training instability and degrades model convergence. To tackle these issues, we propose FedCRT, a Federated Centroid-based Robust Training framework designed to jointly mitigate both issues. At the client level, we introduce a centroid-based noisy label correction mechanism and class-conditional feature centroids. To prevent confirmation bias during this process, we devise a dual-confidence strategy for cautious and accurate label correction, accompanied by a robust loss function to maintain consistent optimization directions. At the server level, we develop a two-stage quality-aware aggregation strategy. It not only mitigates Non-IID-induced client drift but also dynamically assigns greater aggregation weights to clients with higher estimated clean data proportions. Extensive experiments have been conducted on benchmark datasets. The experiment results demonstrate that our method performs well in noisy label detection and correction on different clients under highly heterogeneous label noise scenarios which prove its effectiveness and robustness.
Xu-Ting He, Jiayi Huang, Jinbo Xiong et al.· Fall Joint Computer Conferen...· 0 citations