# Federated Learning on Virtual Heterogeneous Data with Local-global Distillation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.02278 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.02278/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 68 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.05629/) (2016)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Federated Optimization in Heterogeneous Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.06127/) (2018)
- [Benchmarking Neural Network Robustness to Common Corruptions and Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12261/) (2019)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [Deep Learning with Differential Privacy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.00133/) (2016)
- [Membership Inference Attacks against Machine Learning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.05820/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.7495/) (2014)
- [Deep Leakage from Gradients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08935/) (2019)
- [Tackling the Objective Inconsistency Problem in Heterogeneous Federated Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07481/) (2020)
- [Membership Inference Attacks From First Principles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03570/) (2021)
- [Measuring the Effects of Non-Identical Data Distribution for Federated Visual Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.06335/) (2019)
- [Model-Contrastive Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16257/) (2021)
- [Inverting Gradients -- How easy is it to break privacy in federated learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.14053/) (2020)
- [Ensemble Distillation for Robust Model Fusion in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07242/) (2020)
- [Dataset Condensation with Gradient Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05929/) (2020)
- [Dataset Distillation by Matching Training Trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11932/) (2022)
- [Data-Free Knowledge Distillation for Heterogeneous Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.10056/) (2021)
- [Dataset Condensation with Distribution Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04181/) (2021)
- [FedProto: Federated Prototype Learning across Heterogeneous Clients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.00243/) (2021)
- [Dataset Condensation with Differentiable Siamese Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.08259/) (2021)
- [REFUGE Challenge: A Unified Framework for Evaluating Automated Methods for Glaucoma Assessment from Fundus Photographs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03667/) (2019)
- [Evaluating Gradient Inversion Attacks and Defenses in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00059/) (2021)
- [Fine-tuning Global Model via Data-Free Knowledge Distillation for Non-IID Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09249/) (2022)
- [Dataset Distillation: A Comprehensive Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07014/) (2023)
- [Privacy for Free: How does Dataset Condensation Help Privacy?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00240/) (2022)
- [Data Distillation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.04272/) (2023)
- [FedDM: Iterative Distribution Matching for Communication-Efficient Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09653/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Unlocking the Potential of Federated Learning: The Symphony of Dataset Distillation via Deep Generative Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01537/) (2023)
- [Federated Distillation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08564/) (2024)
- [Can Textual Gradient Work in Federated Learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19980/) (2025)
- [Mitigating Bias in Dataset Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06609/) (2024)
- [One-Shot Collaborative Data Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02266/) (2024)
- [Beyond Aggregation: Guiding Clients in Heterogeneous Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23049/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While Federated Learning (FL) is gaining popularity for training machine learning models in a decentralized fashion, numerous challenges persist, such as asynchronization, computational expenses, data heterogeneity, and gradient and membership privacy attacks. Lately, dataset distillation has emerged as a promising solution for addressing the aforementioned challenges by generating a compact synthetic dataset that preserves a model's training efficacy. However, we discover that using distilled local datasets can amplify the heterogeneity issue in FL. To address this, we propose Federated Learning on Virtual Heterogeneous Data with Local-Global Dataset Distillation (FedLGD), where we seamlessly integrate dataset distillation algorithms into FL pipeline and train FL using a smaller synthetic dataset (referred as virtual data). Specifically, to harmonize the domain shifts, we propose iterative distribution matching to inpaint global information to local virtual data and use federated gradient matching to distill global virtual data that serve as anchor points to rectify heterogeneous local training, without compromising data privacy. We experiment on both benchmark and real-world datasets that contain heterogeneous data from different sources, and further scale up to an FL scenario that contains a large number of clients with heterogeneous and class-imbalanced data. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art heterogeneous FL algorithms under various settings. Our code is available at https://github.com/ubc-tea/FedLGD.