From Selection to Scheduling: Federated Geometry-Aware Correction Makes Exemplar Replay Work Better under Continual Dynamic Heterogeneity

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Qi, Zhuang, Tang, Ying-Peng, Meng, Lei, Chao, Guoqing, Wu, Lei, Yu, Han, Meng, Xiangxu
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Qi, Zhuang
Tang, Ying-Peng
Meng, Lei
Chao, Guoqing
Wu, Lei
Yu, Han
Meng, Xiangxu
author_facet Qi, Zhuang
Tang, Ying-Peng
Meng, Lei
Chao, Guoqing
Wu, Lei
Yu, Han
Meng, Xiangxu
contents Exemplar replay has become an effective strategy for mitigating catastrophic forgetting in federated continual learning (FCL) by retaining representative samples from past tasks. Existing studies focus on designing sample-importance estimation mechanisms to identify information-rich samples. However, they typically overlook strategies for effectively utilizing the selected exemplars, which limits their performance under continual dynamic heterogeneity across clients and tasks. To address this issue, this paper proposes a Federated gEometry-Aware correcTion method, termed FEAT, which alleviates imbalance-induced representation collapse that drags rare-class features toward frequent classes across clients. Specifically, it consists of two key modules: 1) the Geometric Structure Alignment module performs structural knowledge distillation by aligning the pairwise angular similarities between feature representations and their corresponding Equiangular Tight Frame prototypes, which are fixed and shared across clients to serve as a class-discriminative reference structure. This encourages geometric consistency across tasks and helps mitigate representation drift; 2) the Energy-based Geometric Correction module removes task-irrelevant directional components from feature embeddings, which reduces prediction bias toward majority classes. This improves sensitivity to minority classes and enhances the model's robustness under class-imbalanced distributions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_08617
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle From Selection to Scheduling: Federated Geometry-Aware Correction Makes Exemplar Replay Work Better under Continual Dynamic Heterogeneity
Qi, Zhuang
Tang, Ying-Peng
Meng, Lei
Chao, Guoqing
Wu, Lei
Yu, Han
Meng, Xiangxu
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Exemplar replay has become an effective strategy for mitigating catastrophic forgetting in federated continual learning (FCL) by retaining representative samples from past tasks. Existing studies focus on designing sample-importance estimation mechanisms to identify information-rich samples. However, they typically overlook strategies for effectively utilizing the selected exemplars, which limits their performance under continual dynamic heterogeneity across clients and tasks. To address this issue, this paper proposes a Federated gEometry-Aware correcTion method, termed FEAT, which alleviates imbalance-induced representation collapse that drags rare-class features toward frequent classes across clients. Specifically, it consists of two key modules: 1) the Geometric Structure Alignment module performs structural knowledge distillation by aligning the pairwise angular similarities between feature representations and their corresponding Equiangular Tight Frame prototypes, which are fixed and shared across clients to serve as a class-discriminative reference structure. This encourages geometric consistency across tasks and helps mitigate representation drift; 2) the Energy-based Geometric Correction module removes task-irrelevant directional components from feature embeddings, which reduces prediction bias toward majority classes. This improves sensitivity to minority classes and enhances the model's robustness under class-imbalanced distributions.
title From Selection to Scheduling: Federated Geometry-Aware Correction Makes Exemplar Replay Work Better under Continual Dynamic Heterogeneity
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08617