FedCM: Client Clustering and Migration in Federated Learning via Gradient Path Similarity and Update Direction Deviation
FedCM: Client Clustering and Migration in Federated Learning via Gradient Path Similarity and Update Direction Deviation
Peng Wang, Shoupeng Lu, Hao Yin, Banglie Yang, Tianli Zhu, Cheng Dai
Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 6343-6351.
https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2025/706
Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative training among multiple clients while preserving data privacy. However, its practical application is significantly limited by two major challenges: statistical heterogeneity and data distribution drift. Statistical heterogeneity causes the direction of local model updates to deviate from the global training objective, while data distribution drift leads to a mismatch between local models and their cluster models. To address these challenges, this paper proposes an adaptive clustered federated learning framework, Fed-CM. Initially, by capturing the dynamic patterns of personalized layer parameters in clients' models, Fed-CM effectively characterizes the correlations and distributional similarities among clients, reflecting the underlying statistical heterogeneity. Subsequently, this framework leverages client similarities to construct an undirected graph and adaptively performs effective cluster discovery with minimal dependence on hyperparameters. Furthermore, a monitoring strategy tracks the deviation between clients’ update directions and the dominant update direction of their clusters and then adaptively migrates clients experiencing data drift. Such a dynamic strategy helps maintain intra-cluster homogeneity and addresses the mismatch between local models and their cluster models. Compared to other state-of-the-art methods, experimental results on multiple datasets demonstrate that the proposed Fed-CM framework effectively addresses the challenges posed by statistical heterogeneity and data drift, significantly improving the performance and robustness of federated learning models.
Keywords:
Machine Learning: ML: Federated learning
Computer Vision: CV: Recognition (object detection, categorization)
Machine Learning: ML: Clustering
Machine Learning: ML: Multi-task and transfer learning
