Diffusion-Guided Semantic Consistency for Multimodal Heterogeneity

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Liu, Jing, Guo, Zhengliang, Wang, Yan, Zhu, Xiaoguang, Du, Yao, Wang, Zehua, Leung, Victor C. M.
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Liu, Jing
Guo, Zhengliang
Wang, Yan
Zhu, Xiaoguang
Du, Yao
Wang, Zehua
Leung, Victor C. M.
author_facet Liu, Jing
Guo, Zhengliang
Wang, Yan
Zhu, Xiaoguang
Du, Yao
Wang, Zehua
Leung, Victor C. M.
contents Federated learning (FL) is severely challenged by non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) client data, a problem that degrades global model performance, especially in multimodal perception settings. Conventional methods often fail to address the underlying semantic discrepancies between clients, leading to suboptimal performance for multimedia systems requiring robust perception. To overcome this, we introduce SemanticFL, a novel framework that leverages the rich semantic representations of pre-trained diffusion models to provide privacy-preserving guidance for local training. Our approach leverages multi-layer semantic representations from a pre-trained Stable Diffusion model (including VAE-encoded latents and U-Net hierarchical features) to create a shared latent space that aligns heterogeneous clients, facilitated by an efficient client-server architecture that offloads heavy computation to the server. A unified consistency mechanism, employing cross-modal contrastive learning, further stabilizes convergence. We conduct extensive experiments on benchmarks including CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and TinyImageNet under diverse heterogeneity scenarios. Our results demonstrate that SemanticFL surpasses existing federated learning approaches, achieving accuracy gains of up to 5.49% over FedAvg, validating its effectiveness in learning robust representations for heterogeneous and multimodal data for perception tasks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_19337
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Diffusion-Guided Semantic Consistency for Multimodal Heterogeneity
Liu, Jing
Guo, Zhengliang
Wang, Yan
Zhu, Xiaoguang
Du, Yao
Wang, Zehua
Leung, Victor C. M.
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Federated learning (FL) is severely challenged by non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) client data, a problem that degrades global model performance, especially in multimodal perception settings. Conventional methods often fail to address the underlying semantic discrepancies between clients, leading to suboptimal performance for multimedia systems requiring robust perception. To overcome this, we introduce SemanticFL, a novel framework that leverages the rich semantic representations of pre-trained diffusion models to provide privacy-preserving guidance for local training. Our approach leverages multi-layer semantic representations from a pre-trained Stable Diffusion model (including VAE-encoded latents and U-Net hierarchical features) to create a shared latent space that aligns heterogeneous clients, facilitated by an efficient client-server architecture that offloads heavy computation to the server. A unified consistency mechanism, employing cross-modal contrastive learning, further stabilizes convergence. We conduct extensive experiments on benchmarks including CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and TinyImageNet under diverse heterogeneity scenarios. Our results demonstrate that SemanticFL surpasses existing federated learning approaches, achieving accuracy gains of up to 5.49% over FedAvg, validating its effectiveness in learning robust representations for heterogeneous and multimodal data for perception tasks.
title Diffusion-Guided Semantic Consistency for Multimodal Heterogeneity
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.19337