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Main Authors: Yan, Shanshan, Li, Zexi, Wu, Chao, Pang, Meng, Lu, Yang, Yan, Yan, Wang, Hanzi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.06916
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author Yan, Shanshan
Li, Zexi
Wu, Chao
Pang, Meng
Lu, Yang
Yan, Yan
Wang, Hanzi
author_facet Yan, Shanshan
Li, Zexi
Wu, Chao
Pang, Meng
Lu, Yang
Yan, Yan
Wang, Hanzi
contents Data heterogeneity, stemming from local non-IID data and global long-tailed distributions, is a major challenge in federated learning (FL), leading to significant performance gaps compared to centralized learning. Previous research found that poor representations and biased classifiers are the main problems and proposed neural-collapse-inspired synthetic simplex ETF to help representations be closer to neural collapse optima. However, we find that the neural-collapse-inspired methods are not strong enough to reach neural collapse and still have huge gaps to centralized training. In this paper, we rethink this issue from a self-bootstrap perspective and propose FedYoYo (You Are Your Own Best Teacher), introducing Augmented Self-bootstrap Distillation (ASD) to improve representation learning by distilling knowledge between weakly and strongly augmented local samples, without needing extra datasets or models. We further introduce Distribution-aware Logit Adjustment (DLA) to balance the self-bootstrap process and correct biased feature representations. FedYoYo nearly eliminates the performance gap, achieving centralized-level performance even under mixed heterogeneity. It enhances local representation learning, reducing model drift and improving convergence, with feature prototypes closer to neural collapse optimality. Extensive experiments show FedYoYo achieves state-of-the-art results, even surpassing centralized logit adjustment methods by 5.4\% under global long-tailed settings.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_06916
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle You Are Your Own Best Teacher: Achieving Centralized-level Performance in Federated Learning under Heterogeneous and Long-tailed Data
Yan, Shanshan
Li, Zexi
Wu, Chao
Pang, Meng
Lu, Yang
Yan, Yan
Wang, Hanzi
Machine Learning
Data heterogeneity, stemming from local non-IID data and global long-tailed distributions, is a major challenge in federated learning (FL), leading to significant performance gaps compared to centralized learning. Previous research found that poor representations and biased classifiers are the main problems and proposed neural-collapse-inspired synthetic simplex ETF to help representations be closer to neural collapse optima. However, we find that the neural-collapse-inspired methods are not strong enough to reach neural collapse and still have huge gaps to centralized training. In this paper, we rethink this issue from a self-bootstrap perspective and propose FedYoYo (You Are Your Own Best Teacher), introducing Augmented Self-bootstrap Distillation (ASD) to improve representation learning by distilling knowledge between weakly and strongly augmented local samples, without needing extra datasets or models. We further introduce Distribution-aware Logit Adjustment (DLA) to balance the self-bootstrap process and correct biased feature representations. FedYoYo nearly eliminates the performance gap, achieving centralized-level performance even under mixed heterogeneity. It enhances local representation learning, reducing model drift and improving convergence, with feature prototypes closer to neural collapse optimality. Extensive experiments show FedYoYo achieves state-of-the-art results, even surpassing centralized logit adjustment methods by 5.4\% under global long-tailed settings.
title You Are Your Own Best Teacher: Achieving Centralized-level Performance in Federated Learning under Heterogeneous and Long-tailed Data
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.06916