{"ID":2841012,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.12628","arxiv_id":"2511.12628","title":"FedTopo: Topology-Informed Representation Alignment in Federated Learning under Non-I.I.D. Conditions","abstract":"Current federated-learning models deteriorate under heterogeneous (non-I.I.D.) client data, as their feature representations diverge and pixel- or patch-level objectives fail to capture the global topology which is essential for high-dimensional visual tasks. We propose FedTopo, a framework that integrates Topological-Guided Block Screening (TGBS) and Topological Embedding (TE) to leverage topological information, yielding coherently aligned cross-client representations by Topological Alignment Loss (TAL). First, Topology-Guided Block Screening (TGBS) automatically selects the most topology-informative block, i.e., the one with maximal topological separability, whose persistence-based signatures best distinguish within- versus between-class pairs, ensuring that subsequent analysis focuses on topology-rich features. Next, this block yields a compact Topological Embedding, which quantifies the topological information for each client. Finally, a Topological Alignment Loss (TAL) guides clients to maintain topological consistency with the global model during optimization, reducing representation drift across rounds. Experiments on Fashion-MNIST, CIFAR-10, and CIFAR-100 under four non-I.I.D. partitions show that FedTopo accelerates convergence and improves accuracy over strong baselines.","short_abstract":"Current federated-learning models deteriorate under heterogeneous (non-I.I.D.) client data, as their feature representations diverge and pixel- or patch-level objectives fail to capture the global topology which is essential for high-dimensional visual tasks. We propose FedTopo, a framework that integrates Topological-...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.12628","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12628v1","authors":"[\"Ke Hu\",\"Liyao Xiang\",\"Peng Tang\",\"Weidong Qiu\"]","published":"2025-11-16T14:40:58Z","proceeding":"cs.LG","tasks":"[\"cs.LG\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}