FedCND: Federated Graph-Level Clustering under Inter-Client Cluster Number Discrepancy

Federated graph-level clustering (FGC) provides an effective solution for analyzing decentralized graph data with privacy protection. Existing methods typically assume that all clients have the same number of clusters. This assumption simplifies the learning task and has achieved preliminary success. However, this assumption rarely holds in practice, as clients often exhibit substantial heterogeneity in both data distributions and semantic granularity. As a result, cluster-specific knowledge becomes misaligned during server-side aggregation, which ultimately degrades the overall clustering performance. To address this challenge, we propose a novel Federated Graph Clustering under Inter-Client Cluster Number Discrepancy (FedCND) framework, which aligns inter-client heterogeneous distributions by decoupling graph data into public and private patterns. Specifically, after initial local training and clustering on each client, we design a public learner and a private learner to model public and private graph data, respectively. Only anonymized, cluster-level public information is uploaded to the server, while private information remains local. On the server, cluster-level public prototypes are aggregated based on affinities between reconstructed cluster-level graphs, enabling privacy-preserving prototype alignment across clients with heterogeneous cluster numbers and mitigating interference from misaligned information during global aggregation. Finally, private subgraphs derive client-specific prototypes through local relearning, which are subsequently fused with globally oriented public prototypes for better clustering. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed FedCND achieves an average of 4.9% accuracy improvement against current state-of-the-art methods.