Accurate Forgetting for Heterogeneous Federated Continual Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Wuerkaixi, Abudukelimu, Cui, Sen, Zhang, Jingfeng, Yan, Kunda, Han, Bo, Niu, Gang, Fang, Lei, Zhang, Changshui, Sugiyama, Masashi
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Wuerkaixi, Abudukelimu
Cui, Sen
Zhang, Jingfeng
Yan, Kunda
Han, Bo
Niu, Gang
Fang, Lei
Zhang, Changshui
Sugiyama, Masashi
author_facet Wuerkaixi, Abudukelimu
Cui, Sen
Zhang, Jingfeng
Yan, Kunda
Han, Bo
Niu, Gang
Fang, Lei
Zhang, Changshui
Sugiyama, Masashi
contents Recent years have witnessed a burgeoning interest in federated learning (FL). However, the contexts in which clients engage in sequential learning remain under-explored. Bridging FL and continual learning (CL) gives rise to a challenging practical problem: federated continual learning (FCL). Existing research in FCL primarily focuses on mitigating the catastrophic forgetting issue of continual learning while collaborating with other clients. We argue that the forgetting phenomena are not invariably detrimental. In this paper, we consider a more practical and challenging FCL setting characterized by potentially unrelated or even antagonistic data/tasks across different clients. In the FL scenario, statistical heterogeneity and data noise among clients may exhibit spurious correlations which result in biased feature learning. While existing CL strategies focus on a complete utilization of previous knowledge, we found that forgetting biased information is beneficial in our study. Therefore, we propose a new concept accurate forgetting (AF) and develop a novel generative-replay method~\method~which selectively utilizes previous knowledge in federated networks. We employ a probabilistic framework based on a normalizing flow model to quantify the credibility of previous knowledge. Comprehensive experiments affirm the superiority of our method over baselines.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_14205
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Accurate Forgetting for Heterogeneous Federated Continual Learning
Wuerkaixi, Abudukelimu
Cui, Sen
Zhang, Jingfeng
Yan, Kunda
Han, Bo
Niu, Gang
Fang, Lei
Zhang, Changshui
Sugiyama, Masashi
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Recent years have witnessed a burgeoning interest in federated learning (FL). However, the contexts in which clients engage in sequential learning remain under-explored. Bridging FL and continual learning (CL) gives rise to a challenging practical problem: federated continual learning (FCL). Existing research in FCL primarily focuses on mitigating the catastrophic forgetting issue of continual learning while collaborating with other clients. We argue that the forgetting phenomena are not invariably detrimental. In this paper, we consider a more practical and challenging FCL setting characterized by potentially unrelated or even antagonistic data/tasks across different clients. In the FL scenario, statistical heterogeneity and data noise among clients may exhibit spurious correlations which result in biased feature learning. While existing CL strategies focus on a complete utilization of previous knowledge, we found that forgetting biased information is beneficial in our study. Therefore, we propose a new concept accurate forgetting (AF) and develop a novel generative-replay method~\method~which selectively utilizes previous knowledge in federated networks. We employ a probabilistic framework based on a normalizing flow model to quantify the credibility of previous knowledge. Comprehensive experiments affirm the superiority of our method over baselines.
title Accurate Forgetting for Heterogeneous Federated Continual Learning
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.14205