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Main Authors: Huang, Zhenyuan, Zhang, Hui, Tang, Wenzhong, Yang, Haijun
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09036
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author Huang, Zhenyuan
Zhang, Hui
Tang, Wenzhong
Yang, Haijun
author_facet Huang, Zhenyuan
Zhang, Hui
Tang, Wenzhong
Yang, Haijun
contents Amid growing demands for data privacy and advances in computational infrastructure, federated learning (FL) has emerged as a prominent distributed learning paradigm. Nevertheless, differences in data distribution (such as covariate and semantic shifts) severely affect its reliability in real-world deployments. To address this issue, we propose FedSDWC, a causal inference method that integrates both invariant and variant features. FedSDWC infers causal semantic representations by modeling the weak causal influence between invariant and variant features, effectively overcoming the limitations of existing invariant learning methods in accurately capturing invariant features and directly constructing causal representations. This approach significantly enhances FL's ability to generalize and detect OOD data. Theoretically, we derive FedSDWC's generalization error bound under specific conditions and, for the first time, establish its relationship with client prior distributions. Moreover, extensive experiments conducted on multiple benchmark datasets validate the superior performance of FedSDWC in handling covariate and semantic shifts. For example, FedSDWC outperforms FedICON, the next best baseline, by an average of 3.04% on CIFAR-10 and 8.11% on CIFAR-100.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_09036
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle FedSDWC: Federated Synergistic Dual-Representation Weak Causal Learning for OOD
Huang, Zhenyuan
Zhang, Hui
Tang, Wenzhong
Yang, Haijun
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Amid growing demands for data privacy and advances in computational infrastructure, federated learning (FL) has emerged as a prominent distributed learning paradigm. Nevertheless, differences in data distribution (such as covariate and semantic shifts) severely affect its reliability in real-world deployments. To address this issue, we propose FedSDWC, a causal inference method that integrates both invariant and variant features. FedSDWC infers causal semantic representations by modeling the weak causal influence between invariant and variant features, effectively overcoming the limitations of existing invariant learning methods in accurately capturing invariant features and directly constructing causal representations. This approach significantly enhances FL's ability to generalize and detect OOD data. Theoretically, we derive FedSDWC's generalization error bound under specific conditions and, for the first time, establish its relationship with client prior distributions. Moreover, extensive experiments conducted on multiple benchmark datasets validate the superior performance of FedSDWC in handling covariate and semantic shifts. For example, FedSDWC outperforms FedICON, the next best baseline, by an average of 3.04% on CIFAR-10 and 8.11% on CIFAR-100.
title FedSDWC: Federated Synergistic Dual-Representation Weak Causal Learning for OOD
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09036