将客户端视为不同环境,通过去混杂提升时空预测的泛化能力。
Every Client Is an Environment: Federated De-confounding for Spatio-Temporal Forecasting

- 把各客户端看作不同因果环境,利用环境异质性学习共享规律。
- 在多个数据集上优于基线方法,尤其在环境变化时表现更稳定。
- 适合需要跨区域迁移、可解释性要求高的时空预测场景。
联邦学习为时空预测(STF)提供了无需共享原始观测的合作训练范式。现有方法多将客户端异质性视为优化挑战,通过个性化策略缓解,但此类异质性本质源于不同的环境条件,导致模型难以在环境变化下泛化。本文核心洞察是:客户端间的环境多样性应被主动利用,因其提供了对同一时空系统的互补观测。为此,我们提出 extbf{method},一种新型联邦去混杂框架,将客户端视为不同的因果环境。该方法利用客户端异质性作为分布式环境证据,学习一个全局原型码本以捕捉共享的环境状态。我们进一步推导出一个理论上的联邦去混杂界,其受平均混淆强度线性控制。大量实验表明, extbf{method} 持续优于现有联邦基线,同时提供可迁移、可解释且通信高效的环境表征。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Federated learning has emerged as a promising paradigm for spatio-temporal forecasting (STF), enabling collaborative model training without sharing raw observations. Existing federated STF methods primarily regard cross-client heterogeneity as an optimization challenge and mitigate it through personalized approaches. However, such heterogeneity fundamentally stems from diverse \emph{environmental conditions}, and these methods capture environment-specific forecasting patterns, hardly generalizing under environmental shifts. Our key insight is that the environmental diversity across federated clients should be exploited, as they provide \emph{complementary observations of the same underlying spatio-temporal system}. Based on this insight, we propose \method, a novel federated de-confounding framework that \textbf{treats clients as distinct causal environments}. \method leverages the client heterogeneity as distributed environmental evidence and learns a global prototype codebook to capture shared environmental regimes. We further derive a theoretical federated de-confounding bound that is linearly controlled by the averaged confounding strength. Extensive experiments demonstrate that \method consistently outperforms federated baselines, while providing transferable, interpretable, and communication-efficient environmental representations.
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