{"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/soft-label-caching-and-sharpening-for","title":"Soft-Label Caching and Sharpening for Communication-Efficient Federated Distillation","arxiv_id":"2504.19602","date":"2025-04-28","proceeding":null,"authors":["Kitsuya Azuma","Takayuki Nishio","Yuichi Kitagawa","Wakako Nakano","Takahito Tanimura"],"abstract":"Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative model training across decentralized clients, enhancing privacy by keeping data local. Yet conventional FL, relying on frequent parameter-sharing, suffers from high communication overhead and limited model heterogeneity. Distillation-based FL approaches address these issues by sharing predictions (soft-labels) instead, but they often involve redundant transmissions across communication rounds, reducing efficiency. We propose SCARLET, a novel framework integrating synchronized soft-label caching and an enhanced Entropy Reduction Aggregation (Enhanced ERA) mechanism. SCARLET minimizes redundant communication by reusing cached soft-labels, achieving up to 50% reduction in communication costs compared to existing methods while maintaining accuracy. Enhanced ERA can be tuned to adapt to non-IID data variations, ensuring robust aggregation and performance in diverse client scenarios. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that SCARLET consistently outperforms state-of-the-art distillation-based FL methods in terms of accuracy and communication efficiency. The implementation of SCARLET is publicly available at https://github.com/kitsuyaazuma/SCARLET.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.19602v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.19602v2.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":"soft-label-caching-and-sharpening-for","repo_url":"https://github.com/kitsuyaazuma/scarlet","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":"1x1-convolution","method_name":"1x1 Convolution"},{"method_slug":"batch-normalization","method_name":"Batch Normalization"},{"method_slug":"dense-connections","method_name":"Dense Connections"},{"method_slug":"depthwise-convolution","method_name":"Depthwise Convolution"},{"method_slug":"depthwise-separable-convolution","method_name":"Depthwise Separable Convolution"},{"method_slug":"inverted-residual-block","method_name":"Inverted Residual Block"},{"method_slug":"pointwise-convolution","method_name":"Pointwise Convolution"},{"method_slug":"residual-connection","method_name":"Residual Connection"},{"method_slug":"scarlet","method_name":"SCARLET"}],"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}