DeepAFL: Deep Analytic Federated Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Tang, Jianheng, Huang, Yajiang, Fan, Kejia, Han, Feijiang, Li, Jiaxu, Xu, Jinfeng, He, Run, Liu, Anfeng, Song, Houbing Herbert, Zhuang, Huiping, Liu, Yunhuai
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Tang, Jianheng
Huang, Yajiang
Fan, Kejia
Han, Feijiang
Li, Jiaxu
Xu, Jinfeng
He, Run
Liu, Anfeng
Song, Houbing Herbert
Zhuang, Huiping
Liu, Yunhuai
author_facet Tang, Jianheng
Huang, Yajiang
Fan, Kejia
Han, Feijiang
Li, Jiaxu
Xu, Jinfeng
He, Run
Liu, Anfeng
Song, Houbing Herbert
Zhuang, Huiping
Liu, Yunhuai
contents Federated Learning (FL) is a popular distributed learning paradigm to break down data silo. Traditional FL approaches largely rely on gradient-based updates, facing significant issues about heterogeneity, scalability, convergence, and overhead, etc. Recently, some analytic-learning-based work has attempted to handle these issues by eliminating gradient-based updates via analytical (i.e., closed-form) solutions. Despite achieving superior invariance to data heterogeneity, these approaches are fundamentally limited by their single-layer linear model with a frozen pre-trained backbone. As a result, they can only achieve suboptimal performance due to their lack of representation learning capabilities. In this paper, to enable representable analytic models while preserving the ideal invariance to data heterogeneity for FL, we propose our Deep Analytic Federated Learning approach, named DeepAFL. Drawing inspiration from the great success of ResNet in gradient-based learning, we design gradient-free residual blocks in our DeepAFL with analytical solutions. We introduce an efficient layer-wise protocol for training our deep analytic models layer by layer in FL through least squares. Both theoretical analyses and empirical evaluations validate our DeepAFL's superior performance with its dual advantages in heterogeneity invariance and representation learning, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines by up to 5.68%-8.42% across three benchmark datasets.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_00579
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle DeepAFL: Deep Analytic Federated Learning
Tang, Jianheng
Huang, Yajiang
Fan, Kejia
Han, Feijiang
Li, Jiaxu
Xu, Jinfeng
He, Run
Liu, Anfeng
Song, Houbing Herbert
Zhuang, Huiping
Liu, Yunhuai
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Federated Learning (FL) is a popular distributed learning paradigm to break down data silo. Traditional FL approaches largely rely on gradient-based updates, facing significant issues about heterogeneity, scalability, convergence, and overhead, etc. Recently, some analytic-learning-based work has attempted to handle these issues by eliminating gradient-based updates via analytical (i.e., closed-form) solutions. Despite achieving superior invariance to data heterogeneity, these approaches are fundamentally limited by their single-layer linear model with a frozen pre-trained backbone. As a result, they can only achieve suboptimal performance due to their lack of representation learning capabilities. In this paper, to enable representable analytic models while preserving the ideal invariance to data heterogeneity for FL, we propose our Deep Analytic Federated Learning approach, named DeepAFL. Drawing inspiration from the great success of ResNet in gradient-based learning, we design gradient-free residual blocks in our DeepAFL with analytical solutions. We introduce an efficient layer-wise protocol for training our deep analytic models layer by layer in FL through least squares. Both theoretical analyses and empirical evaluations validate our DeepAFL's superior performance with its dual advantages in heterogeneity invariance and representation learning, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines by up to 5.68%-8.42% across three benchmark datasets.
title DeepAFL: Deep Analytic Federated Learning
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.00579