# Task-Agnostic Federation over Decentralized Data: Research Landscape and Visions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.03140 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03140/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 57 of its 122 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 57)

- [Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.05629/) (2016)
- [DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12948/) (2025)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [Advances and Open Problems in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04977/) (2019)
- [A Survey on Bias and Fairness in Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09635/) (2019)
- [Depth Anything: Unleashing the Power of Large-Scale Unlabeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10891/) (2024)
- [Class-Balanced Loss Based on Effective Number of Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05555/) (2019)
- [Neural Collaborative Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.05031/) (2017)
- [Towards Federated Learning at Scale: System Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.01046/) (2019)
- [Confident Learning: Estimating Uncertainty in Dataset Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00068/) (2019)
- [Fairness in Machine Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04053/) (2020)
- [Learning with Noisy Labels Revisited: A Study Using Real-World Human Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.12088/) (2021)
- [Federated Learning for Internet of Things: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07914/) (2021)
- [Fast Yet Effective Machine Unlearning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.08947/) (2021)
- [Can AI help in screening Viral and COVID-19 pneumonia?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13145/) (2020)
- [Heterogeneous Federated Learning: State-of-the-art and Research Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10616/) (2023)
- [Decentralized Federated Learning: Fundamentals, State of the Art, Frameworks, Trends, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.08413/) (2022)
- [Evaluation of OpenAI o1: Opportunities and Challenges of AGI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18486/) (2024)
- [FedMix: Approximation of Mixup under Mean Augmented Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00233/) (2021)
- [Federated Collaborative Filtering for Privacy-Preserving Personalized Recommendation System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.09888/) (2019)
- [Federated Reconstruction: Partially Local Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03448/) (2021)
- [Compression of Deep Learning Models for Text: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.05221/) (2020)
- [FedCorr: Multi-Stage Federated Learning for Label Noise Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04677/) (2022)
- [OpenFE: Automated Feature Generation with Expert-level Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12507/) (2022)
- [Langevin Unlearning: A New Perspective of Noisy Gradient Descent for Machine Unlearning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10371/) (2024)
- [MetaFed: Federated Learning among Federations with Cyclic Knowledge Distillation for Personalized Healthcare](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08516/) (2022)
- [How Re-sampling Helps for Long-Tail Learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18236/) (2023)
- [Emerging Trends in Federated Learning: From Model Fusion to Federated X Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12920/) (2021)
- [Federated Learning of Generative Image Priors for MRI Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.04175/) (2022)
- [FedNoRo: Towards Noise-Robust Federated Learning by Addressing Class Imbalance and Label Noise Heterogeneity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05230/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Increasing legislation and regulations on private and proprietary information results in scattered data sources also known as the "data islands". Although Federated Learning-based paradigms can enable privacy-preserving collaboration over decentralized data, they have inherent deficiencies in fairness, costs and reproducibility because of being learning-centric, which greatly limits the way how participants cooperate with each other. In light of this, we investigate the possibilities to shift from resource-intensive learning to task-agnostic collaboration especially when the participants have no interest in a common goal. We term this new scenario as Task-Agnostic Federation (TAF), and investigate several branches of research that serve as the technical building blocks. These techniques directly or indirectly embrace data-centric approaches that can operate independently of any learning task. In this article, we first describe the system architecture and problem setting for TAF. Then, we present a three-way roadmap and categorize recent studies in three directions: collaborative data expansion, collaborative data refinement, and collective data harmonization in the federation. Further, we highlight several challenges and open questions that deserve more attention from the community. With our investigation, we intend to offer new insights about how autonomic parties with varied motivation can cooperate over decentralized data beyond learning.