Decentralized Dynamic Cooperation of Personalized Models for Federated Continual Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Yang, Danni, Chen, Zhikang, Cui, Sen, Yang, Mengyue, Li, Ding, Wuerkaixi, Abudukelimu, Li, Haoxuan, Ren, Jinke, Gong, Mingming
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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_version_ 1866911182067073024
author Yang, Danni
Chen, Zhikang
Cui, Sen
Yang, Mengyue
Li, Ding
Wuerkaixi, Abudukelimu
Li, Haoxuan
Ren, Jinke
Gong, Mingming
author_facet Yang, Danni
Chen, Zhikang
Cui, Sen
Yang, Mengyue
Li, Ding
Wuerkaixi, Abudukelimu
Li, Haoxuan
Ren, Jinke
Gong, Mingming
contents Federated continual learning (FCL) has garnered increasing attention for its ability to support distributed computation in environments with evolving data distributions. However, the emergence of new tasks introduces both temporal and cross-client shifts, making catastrophic forgetting a critical challenge. Most existing works aggregate knowledge from clients into a global model, which may not enhance client performance since irrelevant knowledge could introduce interference, especially in heterogeneous scenarios. Additionally, directly applying decentralized approaches to FCL suffers from ineffective group formation caused by task changes. To address these challenges, we propose a decentralized dynamic cooperation framework for FCL, where clients establish dynamic cooperative learning coalitions to balance the acquisition of new knowledge and the retention of prior learning, thereby obtaining personalized models. To maximize model performance, each client engages in selective cooperation, dynamically allying with others who offer meaningful performance gains. This results in non-overlapping, variable coalitions at each stage of the task. Moreover, we use coalitional affinity game to simulate coalition relationships between clients. By assessing both client gradient coherence and model similarity, we quantify the client benefits derived from cooperation. We also propose a merge-blocking algorithm and a dynamic cooperative evolution algorithm to achieve cooperative and dynamic equilibrium. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method compared to various baselines. Code is available at: https://github.com/ydn3229/DCFCL.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_23683
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Decentralized Dynamic Cooperation of Personalized Models for Federated Continual Learning
Yang, Danni
Chen, Zhikang
Cui, Sen
Yang, Mengyue
Li, Ding
Wuerkaixi, Abudukelimu
Li, Haoxuan
Ren, Jinke
Gong, Mingming
Machine Learning
Federated continual learning (FCL) has garnered increasing attention for its ability to support distributed computation in environments with evolving data distributions. However, the emergence of new tasks introduces both temporal and cross-client shifts, making catastrophic forgetting a critical challenge. Most existing works aggregate knowledge from clients into a global model, which may not enhance client performance since irrelevant knowledge could introduce interference, especially in heterogeneous scenarios. Additionally, directly applying decentralized approaches to FCL suffers from ineffective group formation caused by task changes. To address these challenges, we propose a decentralized dynamic cooperation framework for FCL, where clients establish dynamic cooperative learning coalitions to balance the acquisition of new knowledge and the retention of prior learning, thereby obtaining personalized models. To maximize model performance, each client engages in selective cooperation, dynamically allying with others who offer meaningful performance gains. This results in non-overlapping, variable coalitions at each stage of the task. Moreover, we use coalitional affinity game to simulate coalition relationships between clients. By assessing both client gradient coherence and model similarity, we quantify the client benefits derived from cooperation. We also propose a merge-blocking algorithm and a dynamic cooperative evolution algorithm to achieve cooperative and dynamic equilibrium. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method compared to various baselines. Code is available at: https://github.com/ydn3229/DCFCL.
title Decentralized Dynamic Cooperation of Personalized Models for Federated Continual Learning
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.23683