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Main Authors: Zhang, Jingrui, Xu, Yimeng, Li, Shujie, Liang, Feng, Duan, Haihan, Dong, Yanjie, Leung, Victor C. M., Hu, Xiping
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.27240
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author Zhang, Jingrui
Xu, Yimeng
Li, Shujie
Liang, Feng
Duan, Haihan
Dong, Yanjie
Leung, Victor C. M.
Hu, Xiping
author_facet Zhang, Jingrui
Xu, Yimeng
Li, Shujie
Liang, Feng
Duan, Haihan
Dong, Yanjie
Leung, Victor C. M.
Hu, Xiping
contents Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative model training across decentralized clients without sharing private data. However, FL suffers from biased global models due to non-IID and long-tail data distributions. We propose \textbf{FedSM}, a novel client-centric framework that mitigates this bias through semantics-guided feature mixup and lightweight classifier retraining. FedSM uses a pretrained image-text-aligned model to compute category-level semantic relevance, guiding the category selection of local features to mix-up with global prototypes to generate class-consistent pseudo-features. These features correct classifier bias, especially when data are heavily skewed. To address the concern of potential domain shift between the pretrained model and the data, we propose probabilistic category selection, enhancing feature diversity to effectively mitigate biases. All computations are performed locally, requiring minimal server overhead. Extensive experiments on long-tail datasets with various imbalanced levels demonstrate that FedSM consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in accuracy, with high robustness to domain shift and computational efficiency.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_27240
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle FedSM: Robust Semantics-Guided Feature Mixup for Bias Reduction in Federated Learning with Long-Tail Data
Zhang, Jingrui
Xu, Yimeng
Li, Shujie
Liang, Feng
Duan, Haihan
Dong, Yanjie
Leung, Victor C. M.
Hu, Xiping
Machine Learning
Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative model training across decentralized clients without sharing private data. However, FL suffers from biased global models due to non-IID and long-tail data distributions. We propose \textbf{FedSM}, a novel client-centric framework that mitigates this bias through semantics-guided feature mixup and lightweight classifier retraining. FedSM uses a pretrained image-text-aligned model to compute category-level semantic relevance, guiding the category selection of local features to mix-up with global prototypes to generate class-consistent pseudo-features. These features correct classifier bias, especially when data are heavily skewed. To address the concern of potential domain shift between the pretrained model and the data, we propose probabilistic category selection, enhancing feature diversity to effectively mitigate biases. All computations are performed locally, requiring minimal server overhead. Extensive experiments on long-tail datasets with various imbalanced levels demonstrate that FedSM consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in accuracy, with high robustness to domain shift and computational efficiency.
title FedSM: Robust Semantics-Guided Feature Mixup for Bias Reduction in Federated Learning with Long-Tail Data
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.27240