{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/federated-learning-with-client-exclusive","title":"Navigating Alignment for Non-identical Client Class Sets: A Label Name-Anchored Federated Learning Framework","arxiv_id":"2301.00489","date":"2023-01-01","proceeding":null,"authors":["Jiayun Zhang","Xiyuan Zhang","Xinyang Zhang","Dezhi Hong","Rajesh K. Gupta","Jingbo Shang"],"abstract":"Traditional federated classification methods, even those designed for non-IID clients, assume that each client annotates its local data with respect to the same universal class set. In this paper, we focus on a more general yet practical setting, non-identical client class sets, where clients focus on their own (different or even non-overlapping) class sets and seek a global model that works for the union of these classes. If one views classification as finding the best match between representations produced by data/label encoder, such heterogeneity in client class sets poses a new significant challenge -- local encoders at different clients may operate in different and even independent latent spaces, making it hard to aggregate at the server. We propose a novel framework, FedAlign, to align the latent spaces across clients from both label and data perspectives. From a label perspective, we leverage the expressive natural language class names as a common ground for label encoders to anchor class representations and guide the data encoder learning across clients. From a data perspective, during local training, we regard the global class representations as anchors and leverage the data points that are close/far enough to the anchors of locally-unaware classes to align the data encoders across clients. Our theoretical analysis of the generalization performance and extensive experiments on four real-world datasets of different tasks confirm that FedAlign outperforms various state-of-the-art (non-IID) federated classification methods.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.00489v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.00489v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"federated-learning-with-client-exclusive","repo_url":"https://github.com/jiayunz/fedalign","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"federated-learning","task_name":"Federated Learning"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"align","method_name":"ALIGN"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}