ProxyFL: A Proxy-Guided Framework for Federated Semi-Supervised Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Chen, Duowen, Wang, Yan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Chen, Duowen
Wang, Yan
author_facet Chen, Duowen
Wang, Yan
contents Federated Semi-Supervised Learning (FSSL) aims to collaboratively train a global model across clients by leveraging partially-annotated local data in a privacy-preserving manner. In FSSL, data heterogeneity is a challenging issue, which exists both across clients and within clients. External heterogeneity refers to the data distribution discrepancy across different clients, while internal heterogeneity represents the mismatch between labeled and unlabeled data within clients. Most FSSL methods typically design fixed or dynamic parameter aggregation strategies to collect client knowledge on the server (external) and / or filter out low-confidence unlabeled samples to reduce mistakes in local client (internal). But, the former is hard to precisely fit the ideal global distribution via direct weights, and the latter results in fewer data participation into FL training. To this end, we propose a proxy-guided framework called ProxyFL that focuses on simultaneously mitigating external and internal heterogeneity via a unified proxy. I.e., we consider the learnable weights of classifier as proxy to simulate the category distribution both locally and globally. For external, we explicitly optimize global proxy against outliers instead of direct weights; for internal, we re-include the discarded samples into training by a positive-negative proxy pool to mitigate the impact of potentially-incorrect pseudo-labels. Insight experiments & theoretical analysis show our significant performance and convergence in FSSL.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_21078
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ProxyFL: A Proxy-Guided Framework for Federated Semi-Supervised Learning
Chen, Duowen
Wang, Yan
Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Federated Semi-Supervised Learning (FSSL) aims to collaboratively train a global model across clients by leveraging partially-annotated local data in a privacy-preserving manner. In FSSL, data heterogeneity is a challenging issue, which exists both across clients and within clients. External heterogeneity refers to the data distribution discrepancy across different clients, while internal heterogeneity represents the mismatch between labeled and unlabeled data within clients. Most FSSL methods typically design fixed or dynamic parameter aggregation strategies to collect client knowledge on the server (external) and / or filter out low-confidence unlabeled samples to reduce mistakes in local client (internal). But, the former is hard to precisely fit the ideal global distribution via direct weights, and the latter results in fewer data participation into FL training. To this end, we propose a proxy-guided framework called ProxyFL that focuses on simultaneously mitigating external and internal heterogeneity via a unified proxy. I.e., we consider the learnable weights of classifier as proxy to simulate the category distribution both locally and globally. For external, we explicitly optimize global proxy against outliers instead of direct weights; for internal, we re-include the discarded samples into training by a positive-negative proxy pool to mitigate the impact of potentially-incorrect pseudo-labels. Insight experiments & theoretical analysis show our significant performance and convergence in FSSL.
title ProxyFL: A Proxy-Guided Framework for Federated Semi-Supervised Learning
topic Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.21078