# Clustered Federated Learning via Embedding Distributions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.07769 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07769/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Jun 2025.

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

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.05629/) (2016)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Intriguing properties of neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6199/) (2013)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Sinkhorn Distances: Lightspeed Computation of Optimal Transportation Distances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.0895/) (2013)
- [Deeper, Broader and Artier Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03077/) (2017)
- [Towards Federated Learning at Scale: System Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.01046/) (2019)
- [How To Backdoor Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.00459/) (2018)
- [Ensemble Distillation for Robust Model Fusion in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07242/) (2020)
- [The Future of Digital Health with Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08119/) (2020)
- [Federated Optimization: Distributed Machine Learning for On-Device Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02527/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Lipschitz regularity of deep neural networks: analysis and efficient estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.10965/) (2018)
- [Data-Free Knowledge Distillation for Heterogeneous Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.10056/) (2021)
- [Three Approaches for Personalization with Applications to Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10619/) (2020)
- [Federated learning with hierarchical clustering of local updates to improve training on non-IID data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11791/) (2020)
- [Federated Multi-Task Learning under a Mixture of Distributions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10252/) (2021)
- [Federated Adversarial Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02054/) (2019)
- [Multi-Center Federated Learning: Clients Clustering for Better Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08647/) (2021)
- [Theoretical Analysis of Domain Adaptation with Optimal Transport](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.04420/) (2016)
- [Transfer Adaptation Learning: A Decade Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.04687/) (2019)
- [Flexible Clustered Federated Learning for Client-Level Data Distribution Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09749/) (2021)
- [FedSoft: Soft Clustered Federated Learning with Proximal Local Updating](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.06053/) (2021)
- [Efficient Distribution Similarity Identification in Clustered Federated Learning via Principal Angles Between Client Data Subspaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.10526/) (2022)
- [Revisiting Personalized Federated Learning: Robustness Against Backdoor Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01677/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Federated learning (FL) is a widely used framework for machine learning in distributed data environments where clients hold data that cannot be easily centralised, such as for data protection reasons. FL, however, is known to be vulnerable to non-IID data. Clustered FL addresses this issue by finding more homogeneous clusters of clients. We propose a novel one-shot clustering method, EMD-CFL, using the Earth Mover's distance (EMD) between data distributions in embedding space. We theoretically motivate the use of EMDs using results from the domain adaptation literature and demonstrate empirically superior clustering performance in extensive comparisons against 16 baselines and on a range of challenging datasets.