Data-Free Client Contribution Estimation via Logit Maximization for Federated Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Ukaye, Asim, Tastan, Nurbek, Abdu-Aguye, Mubarak, Nandakumar, Karthik
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Ukaye, Asim
Tastan, Nurbek
Abdu-Aguye, Mubarak
Nandakumar, Karthik
author_facet Ukaye, Asim
Tastan, Nurbek
Abdu-Aguye, Mubarak
Nandakumar, Karthik
contents Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative learning of computer vision models, where privacy and regulatory constraints prevent centralizing data across devices or organizations. However, practical FL deployments often exhibit severe class imbalance and label skew, causing standard aggregation protocols to overfit dominant clients and degrade minority-class performance. We propose a data-free, class-wise contribution estimation and aggregation framework based on logit maximization (CELM) that does not require sharing raw data, client metadata, or auxiliary public datasets. The FL server probes client updates to obtain class-wise evidence scores and assembles a cross-client evidence matrix, which quantifies both per-class competence and class coverage. Using this matrix, we compute contribution weights that upweight clients providing strong, discriminative evidence for underrepresented classes. The resulting aggregation is stable due to simplex constraints and momentum smoothing, and it remains compatible with standard FL training pipelines. We evaluate the approach on representative vision benchmarks under controlled non-IID and pathological label splits, demonstrating that CELM-based aggregation improves robustness to imbalance and statistical heterogeneity, while yielding better performance without requiring any additional data exchange.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_18892
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Data-Free Client Contribution Estimation via Logit Maximization for Federated Learning
Ukaye, Asim
Tastan, Nurbek
Abdu-Aguye, Mubarak
Nandakumar, Karthik
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative learning of computer vision models, where privacy and regulatory constraints prevent centralizing data across devices or organizations. However, practical FL deployments often exhibit severe class imbalance and label skew, causing standard aggregation protocols to overfit dominant clients and degrade minority-class performance. We propose a data-free, class-wise contribution estimation and aggregation framework based on logit maximization (CELM) that does not require sharing raw data, client metadata, or auxiliary public datasets. The FL server probes client updates to obtain class-wise evidence scores and assembles a cross-client evidence matrix, which quantifies both per-class competence and class coverage. Using this matrix, we compute contribution weights that upweight clients providing strong, discriminative evidence for underrepresented classes. The resulting aggregation is stable due to simplex constraints and momentum smoothing, and it remains compatible with standard FL training pipelines. We evaluate the approach on representative vision benchmarks under controlled non-IID and pathological label splits, demonstrating that CELM-based aggregation improves robustness to imbalance and statistical heterogeneity, while yielding better performance without requiring any additional data exchange.
title Data-Free Client Contribution Estimation via Logit Maximization for Federated Learning
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.18892