Multi-task Federated Learning with Encoder-Decoder Structure: Enabling Collaborative Learning Across Different Tasks

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhou, Jingxuan, Bao, Weidong, Wang, Ji, Zhang, Dayu, Zhang, Xiongtao, Zhang, Yaohong
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Zhou, Jingxuan
Bao, Weidong
Wang, Ji
Zhang, Dayu
Zhang, Xiongtao
Zhang, Yaohong
author_facet Zhou, Jingxuan
Bao, Weidong
Wang, Ji
Zhang, Dayu
Zhang, Xiongtao
Zhang, Yaohong
contents Federated learning has been extensively studied and applied due to its ability to ensure data security in distributed environments while building better models. However, clients participating in federated learning still face limitations, as clients with different structures or tasks cannot participate in learning together. In view of this, constructing a federated learning framework that allows collaboration between clients with different model structures and performing different tasks, enabling them to share valuable knowledge to enhance model efficiency, holds significant practical implications for the widespread application of federated learning. To achieve this goal, we propose a multi-task federated learning with encoder-decoder structure (M-Fed). Specifically, given the widespread adoption of the encoder-decoder architecture in current models, we leverage this structure to share intra-task knowledge through traditional federated learning methods and extract general knowledge from the encoder to achieve cross-task knowledge sharing. The training process is similar to traditional federated learning, and we incorporate local decoder and global decoder information into the loss function. The local decoder iteratively updates and gradually approaches the global decoder until sufficient cross-task knowledge sharing is achieved. Our method is lightweight and modular, demonstrating innovation compared to previous research. It enables clients performing different tasks to share general knowledge while maintaining the efficiency of traditional federated learning systems. We conducted experiments on two widely used benchmark datasets to verify the feasibility of M-Fed and compared it with traditional methods. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of M-Fed in multi-task federated learning.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_09800
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Multi-task Federated Learning with Encoder-Decoder Structure: Enabling Collaborative Learning Across Different Tasks
Zhou, Jingxuan
Bao, Weidong
Wang, Ji
Zhang, Dayu
Zhang, Xiongtao
Zhang, Yaohong
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Federated learning has been extensively studied and applied due to its ability to ensure data security in distributed environments while building better models. However, clients participating in federated learning still face limitations, as clients with different structures or tasks cannot participate in learning together. In view of this, constructing a federated learning framework that allows collaboration between clients with different model structures and performing different tasks, enabling them to share valuable knowledge to enhance model efficiency, holds significant practical implications for the widespread application of federated learning. To achieve this goal, we propose a multi-task federated learning with encoder-decoder structure (M-Fed). Specifically, given the widespread adoption of the encoder-decoder architecture in current models, we leverage this structure to share intra-task knowledge through traditional federated learning methods and extract general knowledge from the encoder to achieve cross-task knowledge sharing. The training process is similar to traditional federated learning, and we incorporate local decoder and global decoder information into the loss function. The local decoder iteratively updates and gradually approaches the global decoder until sufficient cross-task knowledge sharing is achieved. Our method is lightweight and modular, demonstrating innovation compared to previous research. It enables clients performing different tasks to share general knowledge while maintaining the efficiency of traditional federated learning systems. We conducted experiments on two widely used benchmark datasets to verify the feasibility of M-Fed and compared it with traditional methods. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of M-Fed in multi-task federated learning.
title Multi-task Federated Learning with Encoder-Decoder Structure: Enabling Collaborative Learning Across Different Tasks
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.09800