解决联邦聚类中碎片化聚类块的拼合问题,实现一次通信完成全局聚类。
Stitch the Fragments: One-Shot Hierarchical Federated Clustering
- 客户端自主探索分布,通过动态参数交织上传原型知识。
- 服务器融合多粒度聚类块,重建连贯的全局层次结构。
- 一次通信完成聚类,兼顾隐私保护与跨异构客户端一致性。
联邦聚类(FC)在真实场景中面临重大瓶颈:全局聚类常被分割为分布在非独立同分布(Non-IID)客户端上的不完整、多粒度且无标签的局部聚类块(clusterlets)。尽管层次聚类理论上适合建模此类嵌套分布,但其递归特性依赖多轮通信,带来高昂计算开销和严重隐私风险。本文提出一种新型的一次性层次联邦聚类框架,旨在无缝“拼合”碎片化的本地聚类块,形成完整的全局分布。该方法使客户端能够自主进行细粒度分布探索,并通过动态参数交织机制上传原型级知识,打乱传输路径,有效防止服务器追踪个体客户端数据分布。随后,服务器端采用多粒度学习机制融合这些粒度不一致的本地聚类块,重建出连贯的全局层次结构以实现最终聚类。在多个真实基准数据集上的实验表明,所提方法能有效弥合异构客户端间的粒度差异,同时通过匿名化的一次性通信最小化隐私暴露风险。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Federated Clustering (FC) faces a critical bottleneck in real-world scenarios, i.e., global clusters are rarely intact, often fragmenting into incomplete, multi-granular unlabeled ``clusterlets'' distributed across Non-IID clients. Although hierarchical clustering is theoretically well-suited to model such nested distributions, its recursive nature strictly relies on multi-round communication, introducing prohibitive computational overhead and severe privacy vulnerabilities. This paper, therefore, proposes a novel one-shot hierarchical federated clustering framework designed to seamlessly ``stitch'' the fragmented local clusterlets into a holistic global distribution. Our approach enables clients to perform autonomous fine-grained distribution exploration, uploading prototype-level knowledge via a dynamic parameter-interleaving mechanism to scramble transmission trajectories, which effectively prevents the server from tracing individual client data distributions. Subsequently, a multi-granular learning mechanism at the server fuses these granularly inconsistent local clusterlets, reconstructing a coherent global hierarchy for ultimate clustering. Extensive experiments on real benchmark datasets illustrate the superiority of the proposed approach, which effectively bridges the granularity gap among heterogeneous clients while minimizing privacy exposure risks via anonymized informative one-shot communication.
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