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Main Authors: Feng, Chao, Kohler, Nicolas Fazli, Wang, Zhi, Niu, Weijie, Celdran, Alberto Huertas, Bovet, Gerome, Stiller, Burkhard
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.10347
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author Feng, Chao
Kohler, Nicolas Fazli
Wang, Zhi
Niu, Weijie
Celdran, Alberto Huertas
Bovet, Gerome
Stiller, Burkhard
author_facet Feng, Chao
Kohler, Nicolas Fazli
Wang, Zhi
Niu, Weijie
Celdran, Alberto Huertas
Bovet, Gerome
Stiller, Burkhard
contents The integration of Federated Learning (FL) and Multi-Task Learning (MTL) has been explored to address client heterogeneity, with Federated Multi-Task Learning (FMTL) treating each client as a distinct task. However, most existing research focuses on data heterogeneity (e.g., addressing non-IID data) rather than task heterogeneity, where clients solve fundamentally different tasks. Additionally, much of the work relies on centralized settings with a server managing the federation, leaving the more challenging domain of decentralized FMTL largely unexplored. Thus, this work bridges this gap by proposing ColNet, a framework designed for heterogeneous tasks in decentralized federated environments. ColNet partitions models into a backbone and task-specific heads, and uses adaptive clustering based on model and data sensitivity to form task-coherent client groups. Backbones are averaged within groups, and group leaders perform hyper-conflict-averse cross-group aggregation. Across datasets and federations, ColNet outperforms competing schemes under label and task heterogeneity and shows robustness to poisoning attacks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_10347
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ColNet: Collaborative Optimization in Decentralized Federated Multi-task Learning Systems
Feng, Chao
Kohler, Nicolas Fazli
Wang, Zhi
Niu, Weijie
Celdran, Alberto Huertas
Bovet, Gerome
Stiller, Burkhard
Machine Learning
The integration of Federated Learning (FL) and Multi-Task Learning (MTL) has been explored to address client heterogeneity, with Federated Multi-Task Learning (FMTL) treating each client as a distinct task. However, most existing research focuses on data heterogeneity (e.g., addressing non-IID data) rather than task heterogeneity, where clients solve fundamentally different tasks. Additionally, much of the work relies on centralized settings with a server managing the federation, leaving the more challenging domain of decentralized FMTL largely unexplored. Thus, this work bridges this gap by proposing ColNet, a framework designed for heterogeneous tasks in decentralized federated environments. ColNet partitions models into a backbone and task-specific heads, and uses adaptive clustering based on model and data sensitivity to form task-coherent client groups. Backbones are averaged within groups, and group leaders perform hyper-conflict-averse cross-group aggregation. Across datasets and federations, ColNet outperforms competing schemes under label and task heterogeneity and shows robustness to poisoning attacks.
title ColNet: Collaborative Optimization in Decentralized Federated Multi-task Learning Systems
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.10347