# Federated Learning with Taskonomy for Non-IID Data

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.15947 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15947/

## Key facts

- Cited by 21 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Mar 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.05629/) (2016)
- [Fashion-MNIST: a Novel Image Dataset for Benchmarking Machine Learning Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07747/) (2017)
- [Advances and Open Problems in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04977/) (2019)
- [Federated Optimization in Heterogeneous Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.06127/) (2018)
- [UMAP: Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection for Dimension Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03426/) (2018)
- [Federated Learning: Challenges, Methods, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07873/) (2019)
- [Federated Learning: Strategies for Improving Communication Efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.05492/) (2016)
- [Federated Learning with Non-IID Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.00582/) (2018)
- [Measuring the Effects of Non-Identical Data Distribution for Federated Visual Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.06335/) (2019)
- [LEAF: A Benchmark for Federated Settings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01097/) (2018)
- [How To Backdoor Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.00459/) (2018)
- [Federated Multi-Task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.10467/) (2017)
- [Taskonomy: Disentangling Task Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08328/) (2018)
- [Local SGD Converges Fast and Communicates Little](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.09767/) (2018)
- [An Efficient Framework for Clustered Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04088/) (2020)
- [Clustered Federated Learning: Model-Agnostic Distributed Multi-Task Optimization under Privacy Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01991/) (2019)
- [Differentially Private Federated Learning: A Client Level Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.07557/) (2017)
- [Agnostic Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00146/) (2019)
- [Robust and Communication-Efficient Federated Learning from Non-IID Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.02891/) (2019)
- [Fair Resource Allocation in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10497/) (2019)
- [Fairness Without Demographics in Repeated Loss Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.08010/) (2018)
- [Three Approaches for Personalization with Applications to Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10619/) (2020)
- [Personalized Federated Learning: A Meta-Learning Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.07948/) (2020)
- [Attack of the Tails: Yes, You Really Can Backdoor Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.05084/) (2020)
- [Improving Federated Learning Personalization via Model Agnostic Meta Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12488/) (2019)
- [Can You Really Backdoor Federated Learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07963/) (2019)
- [Federated learning with hierarchical clustering of local updates to improve training on non-IID data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11791/) (2020)
- [Federated Optimization:Distributed Optimization Beyond the Datacenter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.03575/) (2015)
- [Cooperative SGD: A unified Framework for the Design and Analysis of Communication-Efficient SGD Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.07576/) (2018)
- [Heterogeneity for the Win: One-Shot Federated Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00697/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Optimality and Stability in Federated Learning: A Game-theoretic Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09580/) (2021)
- [Efficient Distribution Similarity Identification in Clustered Federated Learning via Principal Angles Between Client Data Subspaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.10526/) (2022)
- [FedFM: Anchor-based Feature Matching for Data Heterogeneity in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07615/) (2022)
- [FedICT: Federated Multi-task Distillation for Multi-access Edge Computing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00389/) (2023)
- [Non-IID data in Federated Learning: A Survey with Taxonomy, Metrics, Methods, Frameworks and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.12377/) (2024)
- [Application of federated learning techniques for arrhythmia classification using 12-lead ECG signals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10993/) (2022)
- [Federated Learning with Server Learning: Enhancing Performance for Non-IID Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02614/) (2022)
- [Coordination-free Decentralised Federated Learning on Complex Networks: Overcoming Heterogeneity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04504/) (2023)
- [Contrastive encoder pre-training-based clustered federated learning for heterogeneous data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16535/) (2023)
- [A Thorough Assessment of the Non-IID Data Impact in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17070/) (2025)
- [OCTOPUS: Overcoming Performance andPrivatization Bottlenecks in Distributed Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.00602/) (2021)
- [Uncovering Promises and Challenges of Federated Learning to Detect Cardiovascular Diseases: A Scoping Literature Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13714/) (2023)
- [A survey on Clustered Federated Learning: Taxonomy, Analysis and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.17512/) (2025)
- [Federated Learning with Only Positive Labels by Exploring Label Correlations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15598/) (2024)
- [Cross-Fusion Rule for Personalized Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02531/) (2023)
- [Federated Semi-Supervised Learning with Annotation Heterogeneity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.02445/) (2023)
- [DAG-ACFL: Asynchronous Clustered Federated Learning based on DAG-DLT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13158/) (2023)
- [MAPL: Model Agnostic Peer-to-peer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19792/) (2024)
- [CDFL: Efficient Federated Human Activity Recognition using Contrastive Learning and Deep Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12287/) (2024)
- [SimDeep: Federated 3D Indoor Localization via Similarity-Aware Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01515/) (2025)
- [FederatedFactory: Generative One-Shot Learning for Extremely Non-IID Distributed Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16370/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Classical federated learning approaches incur significant performance degradation in the presence of non-IID client data. A possible direction to address this issue is forming clusters of clients with roughly IID data. Most solutions following this direction are iterative and relatively slow, also prone to convergence issues in discovering underlying cluster formations. We introduce federated learning with taskonomy (FLT) that generalizes this direction by learning the task-relatedness between clients for more efficient federated aggregation of heterogeneous data. In a one-off process, the server provides the clients with a pretrained (and fine-tunable) encoder to compress their data into a latent representation, and transmit the signature of their data back to the server. The server then learns the task-relatedness among clients via manifold learning, and performs a generalization of federated averaging. FLT can flexibly handle a generic client relatedness graph, when there are no explicit clusters of clients, as well as efficiently decompose it into (disjoint) clusters for clustered federated learning. We demonstrate that FLT not only outperforms the existing state-of-the-art baselines in non-IID scenarios but also offers improved fairness across clients.