解决联邦学习中标签粒度不一致问题,提升跨设备分类鲁棒性。
Label Granularity Skew in Federated Learning with Hierarchical Image Classification

- 构建客户端专属标签层级,区分粗粒度与细粒度标注差异
- 提出联邦版分支解耦微调方法,在0.9标签偏移下准确率提升56.4%
- 适合多设备协同的层次化图像分类场景,尤其对未见细粒度类泛化优
联邦学习实现分布式设备间隐私保护协作,无需集中本地数据。然而,客户端不仅在数据分布上存在差异,其领域知识与标注能力也各不相同。本文引入标签粒度偏移这一新型统计异质性:在共享分类层级下,不同客户端以不同详细程度提供一致的分类标签。为建模此异质性,我们采用概率关系邻近分类器生成客户端专属局部标签层级,并通过轮廓系数引导的粗化策略构建基于WordNet的全局层级。分析表明,强耦合的层次模型对不完整监督敏感,而条件Softmax分类器更具鲁棒性。基于此,我们提出分支解耦微调(BDFT)及其联邦版本FedBDFT,通过分支级分类器微调并结合联邦优化聚合。在CIFAR-100、TinyImageNet和ImageNet上的实验显示,当标签粒度偏移达0.6和0.9时,FedBDFT平均准确率分别提升27.9%和56.4%。零样本结果进一步表明,该方法更有效保留对未见细粒度类的层次表征。这些发现证明了其在异构标签粒度下的联邦层次分类有效性。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Federated learning enables privacy-preserving collaboration across distributed devices without centralizing local data. However, clients may differ not only in data distributions but also in domain knowledge and annotation capabilities. In this paper, we introduce label granularity skew, a new form of statistical heterogeneity in federated hierarchical classification, in which clients provide taxonomy-consistent labels at different levels of detail within a shared class hierarchy. To model this heterogeneity, we generate client-specific local label hierarchies using a probabilistic relational neighbor classifier and construct a WordNet-guided hierarchy via silhouette score-based coarsening. Our analysis shows that strongly coupled hierarchical models are sensitive to incomplete supervision, while the conditional softmax classifier is more robust. Based on this insight, we propose Branch-wise Decoupled Fine-Tuning (BDFT) and its federated version, FedBDFT, which fine-tune branch-wise classifiers and aggregate them through federated optimization. Experiments on CIFAR-100, TinyImageNet, and ImageNet show that FedBDFT substantially improves robustness under severe label granularity skew, with average gains of 27.9% and 56.4% at skewness levels of 0.6 and 0.9, respectively. Zero-shot results further indicate that FedBDFT better preserves hierarchical representations for unseen fine-grained classes. These findings demonstrate its effectiveness for federated hierarchical classification with heterogeneous label granularities.
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