pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
SentiDrop: A Multi Modal Machine Learning model for Predicting Dropout in Distance Learning
Authors: Meriem Zerkouk, Miloud Mihoubi, Belkacem Chikhaoui
Date: 2025-07-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Feature Importance, Sentiment Analysis, Student dropout

School dropout is a serious problem in distance learning, where early detection is crucial for effective intervention and student perseverance. Predicting student dropout using available educational data is a widely researched topic in learning analytics. Our partner's distance learning platform highlights the importance of integrating diverse data sources, including socio-demographic data, behavioral data, and sentiment analysis, to accurately predict dropout risks. In this paper, we introduce a novel model that combines sentiment analysis of student comments using the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model with socio-demographic and behavioral data analyzed through Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost). We fine-tuned BERT on student comments to capture nuanced sentiments, which were then merged with key features selected using feature importance techniques in XGBoost. Our model was tested on unseen data from the next academic year, achieving an accuracy of 84\%, compared to 82\% for the baseline model. Additionally, the model demonstrated superior performance in other metrics, such as precision and F1-score. The proposed method could be a vital tool in developing personalized strategies to reduce dropout rates and encourage student perseverance
Leveraging RAG-LLMs for Urban Mobility Simulation and Analysis
Authors: Yue Ding, Conor McCarthy, Kevin O'Shea, Mingming Liu
Date: 2025-07-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, RAG

With the rise of smart mobility and shared e-mobility services, numerous advanced technologies have been applied to this field. Cloud-based traffic simulation solutions have flourished, offering increasingly realistic representations of the evolving mobility landscape. LLMs have emerged as pioneering tools, providing robust support for various applications, including intelligent decision-making, user interaction, and real-time traffic analysis. As user demand for e-mobility continues to grow, delivering comprehensive end-to-end solutions has become crucial. In this paper, we present a cloud-based, LLM-powered shared e-mobility platform, integrated with a mobile application for personalized route recommendations. The optimization module is evaluated based on travel time and cost across different traffic scenarios. Additionally, the LLM-powered RAG framework is evaluated at the schema level for different users, using various evaluation methods. Schema-level RAG with XiYanSQL achieves an average execution accuracy of 0.81 on system operator queries and 0.98 on user queries.
Feature Distillation is the Better Choice for Model-Heterogeneous Federated Learning
Authors: Yichen Li
Date: 2025-07-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Knowledge Distillation

Model-Heterogeneous Federated Learning (Hetero-FL) has attracted growing attention for its ability to aggregate knowledge from heterogeneous models while keeping private data locally. To better aggregate knowledge from clients, ensemble distillation, as a widely used and effective technique, is often employed after global aggregation to enhance the performance of the global model. However, simply combining Hetero-FL and ensemble distillation does not always yield promising results and can make the training process unstable. The reason is that existing methods primarily focus on logit distillation, which, while being model-agnostic with softmax predictions, fails to compensate for the knowledge bias arising from heterogeneous models. To tackle this challenge, we propose a stable and efficient Feature Distillation for model-heterogeneous Federated learning, dubbed FedFD, that can incorporate aligned feature information via orthogonal projection to integrate knowledge from heterogeneous models better. Specifically, a new feature-based ensemble federated knowledge distillation paradigm is proposed. The global model on the server needs to maintain a projection layer for each client-side model architecture to align the features separately. Orthogonal techniques are employed to re-parameterize the projection layer to mitigate knowledge bias from heterogeneous models and thus maximize the distilled knowledge. Extensive experiments show that FedFD achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Convergence of Agnostic Federated Averaging
Authors: Herlock, Rahimi, Dionysis Kalogerias
Date: 2025-07-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

Federated learning (FL) enables decentralized model training without centralizing raw data. However, practical FL deployments often face a key realistic challenge: Clients participate intermittently in server aggregation and with unknown, possibly biased participation probabilities. Most existing convergence results either assume full-device participation, or rely on knowledge of (in fact uniform) client availability distributions -- assumptions that rarely hold in practice. In this work, we characterize the optimization problem that consistently adheres to the stochastic dynamics of the well-known \emph{agnostic Federated Averaging (FedAvg)} algorithm under random (and variably-sized) client availability, and rigorously establish its convergence for convex, possibly nonsmooth losses, achieving a standard rate of order $\mathcal{O}(1/\sqrt{T})$, where $T$ denotes the aggregation horizon. Our analysis provides the first convergence guarantees for agnostic FedAvg under general, non-uniform, stochastic client participation, without knowledge of the participation distribution. We also empirically demonstrate that agnostic FedAvg in fact outperforms common (and suboptimal) weighted aggregation FedAvg variants, even with server-side knowledge of participation weights.
Domain Borders Are There to Be Crossed With Federated Few-Shot Adaptation
Authors: Manuel Röder, Christoph Raab, Frank-Michael Schleif
Date: 2025-07-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Federated Learning, Privacy Preserving

Federated Learning has emerged as a leading paradigm for decentralized, privacy-preserving learning, particularly relevant in the era of interconnected edge devices equipped with sensors. However, the practical implementation of Federated Learning faces three primary challenges: the need for human involvement in costly data labelling processes for target adaptation, covariate shift in client device data collection due to environmental factors affecting sensors, leading to discrepancies between source and target samples, and the impracticality of continuous or regular model updates in resource-constrained environments due to limited data transmission capabilities and technical constraints on channel availability and energy efficiency. To tackle these issues, we expand upon an efficient and scalable Federated Learning framework tailored for real-world client adaptation in industrial settings. This framework leverages a pre-trained source model comprising a deep backbone, an adaptation module, and a classifier running on a powerful server. By freezing the backbone and classifier during client adaptation on resource-constrained devices, we allow the domain adaptive linear layer to handle target domain adaptation, thus minimizing overall computational overhead. Furthermore, this setup, designated as FedAcross+, is extended to encompass the processing of streaming data, thereby rendering the solution suitable for non-stationary environments. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of FedAcross+ in achieving competitive adaptation on low-end client devices with limited target samples, successfully addressing the challenge of domain shift. Moreover, our framework accommodates sporadic model updates within resource-constrained environments, ensuring practical and seamless deployment.
MTF-Grasp: A Multi-tier Federated Learning Approach for Robotic Grasping
Authors: Obaidullah Zaland, Erik Elmroth, Monowar Bhuyan
Date: 2025-07-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Robotic Grasping

Federated Learning (FL) is a promising machine learning paradigm that enables participating devices to train privacy-preserved and collaborative models. FL has proven its benefits for robotic manipulation tasks. However, grasping tasks lack exploration in such settings where robots train a global model without moving data and ensuring data privacy. The main challenge is that each robot learns from data that is nonindependent and identically distributed (non-IID) and of low quantity. This exhibits performance degradation, particularly in robotic grasping. Thus, in this work, we propose MTF-Grasp, a multi-tier FL approach for robotic grasping, acknowledging the unique challenges posed by the non-IID data distribution across robots, including quantitative skewness. MTF-Grasp harnesses data quality and quantity across robots to select a set of "top-level" robots with better data distribution and higher sample count. It then utilizes top-level robots to train initial seed models and distribute them to the remaining "low-level" robots, reducing the risk of model performance degradation in low-level robots. Our approach outperforms the conventional FL setup by up to 8% on the quantity-skewed Cornell and Jacquard grasping datasets.
Differentially Private Federated Low Rank Adaptation Beyond Fixed-Matrix
Authors: Ming Wen, Jiaqi Zhu, Yuedong Xu, Yipeng Zhou, Dingding Han
Date: 2025-07-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Privacy Preserving

Large language models (LLMs) typically require fine-tuning for domain-specific tasks, and LoRA offers a computationally efficient approach by training low-rank adapters. LoRA is also communication-efficient for federated LLMs when multiple users collaboratively fine-tune a global LLM model without sharing their proprietary raw data. However, even the transmission of local adapters between a server and clients risks serious privacy leakage. Applying differential privacy (DP) to federated LoRA encounters a dilemma: adding noise to both adapters amplifies synthetic noise on the model, while fixing one adapter impairs the learnability of fine-tuning. In this paper, we propose FedASK (Differentially Private Federated Low Rank Adaptation with Double Sketching) , a novel federated LoRA framework to enable effective updating of both low-rank adapters with robust differential privacy. Inspired by randomized SVD, our key idea is a two-stage sketching pipeline. This pipeline first aggregates carefully sketched, privacy-preserving local updates, and then reconstructs the global matrices on the server to facilitate effective updating of both adapters. We theoretically prove FedASK's differential privacy guarantee and its exact aggregation property. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that FedASK consistently outperforms baseline methods across a variety of privacy settings and data distributions.
Federated Learning with Graph-Based Aggregation for Traffic Forecasting
Authors: Audri Banik, Glaucio Haroldo Silva de Carvalho, Renata Dividino
Date: 2025-07-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Graph Learning, Traffic Prediction

In traffic prediction, the goal is to estimate traffic speed or flow in specific regions or road segments using historical data collected by devices deployed in each area. Each region or road segment can be viewed as an individual client that measures local traffic flow, making Federated Learning (FL) a suitable approach for collaboratively training models without sharing raw data. In centralized FL, a central server collects and aggregates model updates from multiple clients to build a shared model while preserving each client's data privacy. Standard FL methods, such as Federated Averaging (FedAvg), assume that clients are independent, which can limit performance in traffic prediction tasks where spatial relationships between clients are important. Federated Graph Learning methods can capture these dependencies during server-side aggregation, but they often introduce significant computational overhead. In this paper, we propose a lightweight graph-aware FL approach that blends the simplicity of FedAvg with key ideas from graph learning. Rather than training full models, our method applies basic neighbourhood aggregation principles to guide parameter updates, weighting client models based on graph connectivity. This approach captures spatial relationships effectively while remaining computationally efficient. We evaluate our method on two benchmark traffic datasets, METR-LA and PEMS-BAY, and show that it achieves competitive performance compared to standard baselines and recent graph-based federated learning techniques.
DRAGD: A Federated Unlearning Data Reconstruction Attack Based on Gradient Differences
Authors: Bocheng Ju, Junchao Fan, Jiaqi Liu, Xiaolin Chang
Date: 2025-07-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Reconstruction Attack

Federated learning enables collaborative machine learning while preserving data privacy. However, the rise of federated unlearning, designed to allow clients to erase their data from the global model, introduces new privacy concerns. Specifically, the gradient exchanges during the unlearning process can leak sensitive information about deleted data. In this paper, we introduce DRAGD, a novel attack that exploits gradient discrepancies before and after unlearning to reconstruct forgotten data. We also present DRAGDP, an enhanced version of DRAGD that leverages publicly available prior data to improve reconstruction accuracy, particularly for complex datasets like facial images. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets demonstrate that DRAGD and DRAGDP significantly outperform existing methods in data reconstruction.Our work highlights a critical privacy vulnerability in federated unlearning and offers a practical solution, advancing the security of federated unlearning systems in real-world applications.
Lightweight Federated Learning over Wireless Edge Networks
Authors: Xiangwang Hou, Jingjing Wang, Jun Du, Chunxiao Jiang, Yong Ren, Dusit Niyato
Date: 2025-07-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Optimization, Federated Learning, Quantization

With the exponential growth of smart devices connected to wireless networks, data production is increasing rapidly, requiring machine learning (ML) techniques to unlock its value. However, the centralized ML paradigm raises concerns over communication overhead and privacy. Federated learning (FL) offers an alternative at the network edge, but practical deployment in wireless networks remains challenging. This paper proposes a lightweight FL (LTFL) framework integrating wireless transmission power control, model pruning, and gradient quantization. We derive a closed-form expression of the FL convergence gap, considering transmission error, model pruning error, and gradient quantization error. Based on these insights, we formulate an optimization problem to minimize the convergence gap while meeting delay and energy constraints. To solve the non-convex problem efficiently, we derive closed-form solutions for the optimal model pruning ratio and gradient quantization level, and employ Bayesian optimization for transmission power control. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets show that LTFL outperforms state-of-the-art schemes.
FedGSCA: Medical Federated Learning with Global Sample Selector and Client Adaptive Adjuster under Label Noise
Authors: Mengwen Ye, Yingzi Huangfu, Shujian Gao, Wei Ren, Weifan Liu, Zekuan Yu
Date: 2025-07-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, image-classification, Image Classification, Medical Image Classification, Pseudo Label

Federated Learning (FL) emerged as a solution for collaborative medical image classification while preserving data privacy. However, label noise, which arises from inter-institutional data variability, can cause training instability and degrade model performance. Existing FL methods struggle with noise heterogeneity and the imbalance in medical data. Motivated by these challenges, we propose FedGSCA, a novel framework for enhancing robustness in noisy medical FL. FedGSCA introduces a Global Sample Selector that aggregates noise knowledge from all clients, effectively addressing noise heterogeneity and improving global model stability. Furthermore, we develop a Client Adaptive Adjustment (CAA) mechanism that combines adaptive threshold pseudo-label generation and Robust Credal Labeling Loss. CAA dynamically adjusts to class distributions, ensuring the inclusion of minority samples and carefully managing noisy labels by considering multiple plausible labels. This dual approach mitigates the impact of noisy data and prevents overfitting during local training, which improves the generalizability of the model. We evaluate FedGSCA on one real-world colon slides dataset and two synthetic medical datasets under various noise conditions, including symmetric, asymmetric, extreme, and heterogeneous types. The results show that FedGSCA outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, excelling in extreme and heterogeneous noise scenarios. Moreover, FedGSCA demonstrates significant advantages in improving model stability and handling complex noise, making it well-suited for real-world medical federated learning scenarios.
Model Parallelism With Subnetwork Data Parallelism
Authors: Vaibhav Singh, Zafir Khalid, Edouard Oyallon, Eugene Belilovsky
Date: 2025-07-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Federated Learning, model

Distributed pre-training of large models at scale often imposes heavy memory demands on individual nodes and incurs significant intra-node communication costs. We propose a novel alternative approach that reduces the memory requirements by training small, structured subnetworks of the model on separate workers. Unlike pipelining, our method avoids inter-node activation communication and maintains bandwidth requirements that are comparable to or lower than standard data parallel communication schemes based on all-reduce. We evaluate two subnetwork construction strategies guided by the principle of ensuring uniform representation of each parameter across the distributed training setup. Our results show that the stochastic block dropping technique consistently outperforms the width-wise subnetwork construction previously explored in federated learning. We empirically attribute this superior performance to stronger gradient alignment in subnetworks that retain blocks having skip connections. Preliminary experiments highlight the promise of our approach, achieving a 20-40% reduction in memory usage without any loss in performance.
Geo-ORBIT: A Federated Digital Twin Framework for Scene-Adaptive Lane Geometry Detection
Authors: Rei Tamaru, Pei Li, Bin Ran
Date: 2025-07-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Federated Learning, Lane Detection, Meta-Learning, Privacy Preserving

Digital Twins (DT) have the potential to transform traffic management and operations by creating dynamic, virtual representations of transportation systems that sense conditions, analyze operations, and support decision-making. A key component for DT of the transportation system is dynamic roadway geometry sensing. However, existing approaches often rely on static maps or costly sensors, limiting scalability and adaptability. Additionally, large-scale DTs that collect and analyze data from multiple sources face challenges in privacy, communication, and computational efficiency. To address these challenges, we introduce Geo-ORBIT (Geometrical Operational Roadway Blueprint with Integrated Twin), a unified framework that combines real-time lane detection, DT synchronization, and federated meta-learning. At the core of Geo-ORBIT is GeoLane, a lightweight lane detection model that learns lane geometries from vehicle trajectory data using roadside cameras. We extend this model through Meta-GeoLane, which learns to personalize detection parameters for local entities, and FedMeta-GeoLane, a federated learning strategy that ensures scalable and privacy-preserving adaptation across roadside deployments. Our system is integrated with CARLA and SUMO to create a high-fidelity DT that renders highway scenarios and captures traffic flows in real-time. Extensive experiments across diverse urban scenes show that FedMeta-GeoLane consistently outperforms baseline and meta-learning approaches, achieving lower geometric error and stronger generalization to unseen locations while drastically reducing communication overhead. This work lays the foundation for flexible, context-aware infrastructure modeling in DTs. The framework is publicly available at https://github.com/raynbowy23/FedMeta-GeoLane.git.
Towards Collaborative Fairness in Federated Learning Under Imbalanced Covariate Shift
Authors: Tianrun Yu, Jiaqi Wang, Haoyu Wang, Mingquan Lin, Han Liu, Nelson S. Yee, Fenglong Ma
Date: 2025-07-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Collaborative Fairness, Fairness, Federated Learning, Knowledge Distillation

Collaborative fairness is a crucial challenge in federated learning. However, existing approaches often overlook a practical yet complex form of heterogeneity: imbalanced covariate shift. We provide a theoretical analysis of this setting, which motivates the design of FedAKD (Federated Asynchronous Knowledge Distillation)- simple yet effective approach that balances accurate prediction with collaborative fairness. FedAKD consists of client and server updates. In the client update, we introduce a novel asynchronous knowledge distillation strategy based on our preliminary analysis, which reveals that while correctly predicted samples exhibit similar feature distributions across clients, incorrectly predicted samples show significant variability. This suggests that imbalanced covariate shift primarily arises from misclassified samples. Leveraging this insight, our approach first applies traditional knowledge distillation to update client models while keeping the global model fixed. Next, we select correctly predicted high-confidence samples and update the global model using these samples while keeping client models fixed. The server update simply aggregates all client models. We further provide a theoretical proof of FedAKD's convergence. Experimental results on public datasets (FashionMNIST and CIFAR10) and a real-world Electronic Health Records (EHR) dataset demonstrate that FedAKD significantly improves collaborative fairness, enhances predictive accuracy, and fosters client participation even under highly heterogeneous data distributions.