Traceable Federated Continual Learning
Qiang Wang, Bingyan Liu, Yawen Li
Abstract
Federated continual learning (FCL) is a typical mecha-nism to achieve collaborative model training among clients that own dynamic data. While traditional FCL methods have been proved effective, they do not consider the task repeatability and fail to achieve good performance under this practical scenario. In this paper, we propose a new paradigm, namely Traceable Federated Continual Learning (TFCL), aiming to cope with repetitive tasks by tracing and augmenting them. Following the new paradigm, we de-velop TagFed, a framework that enables accurate and ef-fective Tracing, augmentation, and Federation for TFCL. The key idea is to decompose the whole model into a se-ries of marked sub-models for optimizing each client task, before conducting group-wise knowledge aggregation, such that the repetitive tasks can be located precisely and fed-erated selectively for improved performance. Extensive ex-periments on our constructed benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed framework. We will release our code at: https://github.com/POwerWeirdo/TagFCL.
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Cited by top-tier papers6
- Resource-Constrained Federated Continual Learning: What Does Matter?Yichen Li, Yuying Wang, Jiahua Dong, Haozhao Wang et al.NeurIPS 2025 · 7 citations
- PA3Fed: Period-Aware Adaptive Aggregation for Improved Federated LearningChengxiang Huang, Bingyan LiuAAAI 2025 · 4 citations
- BTFL: A Bayesian-based Test-Time Generalization Method for Internal and External Data Distributions in Federated learningYu Zhou, Bingyan LiuKDD 2025 · 3 citations
- Cross-task Calibration for Asynchronous Federated Continual LearningYichen Li, Haozhao Wang, Hang Su, Yulong Li et al.ICML 2026
- RC-FCL: Combating Asynchronous Concept Drift in Federated Continual Learning via Retrospective CalibrationHang Su, Yijun Mo, Zhiyu Zhang, Yankai Jiang et al.ICML 2026
Builds on18
- Exploiting Unintended Feature Leakage in Collaborative LearningLuca Melis, Congzheng Song, Emiliano De Cristofaro, Vitaly ShmatikovS&P 2019 · 1,736 citations
- Federated Continual Learning with Weighted Inter-client TransferJaehong Yoon, Wonyong Jeong, Giwoong Lee, Eunho Yang et al.ICML 2021 · 303 citations
- Federated Class-Incremental LearningJiahua Dong, Lixu Wang, Zhen Fang, Gan Sun et al.CVPR 2022 · 197 citations
- Characterizing Impacts of Heterogeneity in Federated Learning upon Large-Scale Smartphone DataChengxu Yang, Qipeng Wang, Mengwei Xu, Zhenpeng Chen et al.WWW 2021 · 171 citations
- PFA: Privacy-preserving Federated Adaptation for Effective Model PersonalizationBingyan Liu, Yao Guo, Xiangqun ChenWWW 2021 · 118 citations
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