# FedDifRC: Unlocking the Potential of Text-to-Image Diffusion Models in Heterogeneous Federated Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.06482 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06482/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Robustness, privacy and adversarial aspects, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 62 of its 79 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Jul 2025.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Robustness, privacy and adversarial aspects](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/robustness-privacy-and-adversarial-aspects/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 62)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.05629/) (2016)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09672/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [Federated Learning: Challenges, Methods, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07873/) (2019)
- [EuroSAT: A Novel Dataset and Deep Learning Benchmark for Land Use and Land Cover Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.00029/) (2017)
- [Moment Matching for Multi-Source Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01754/) (2018)
- [On the Convergence of FedAvg on Non-IID Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02189/) (2019)
- [Diffusion Models: A Comprehensive Survey of Methods and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00796/) (2022)
- [Diffusion Models in Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.04747/) (2022)
- [Learning Imbalanced Datasets with Label-Distribution-Aware Margin Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07413/) (2019)
- [What Makes for Good Views for Contrastive Learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10243/) (2020)
- [Model-Contrastive Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16257/) (2021)
- [Federated Learning on Non-IID Data Silos: An Experimental Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02079/) (2021)
- [Federated Learning with Matched Averaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.06440/) (2020)
- [Emergent Correspondence from Image Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03881/) (2023)
- [Understanding the Behaviour of Contrastive Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09740/) (2020)
- [Debiased Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00224/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Diffusion-Guided Semantic Consistency for Multimodal Heterogeneity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19337/) (2026)
- [Collaborative Adaptive Curriculum for Progressive Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.20296/) (2026)
- [Domain-Skewed Federated Learning with Feature Decoupling and Calibration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14238/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Federated learning aims at training models collaboratively across participants while protecting privacy. However, one major challenge for this paradigm is the data heterogeneity issue, where biased data preferences across multiple clients, harming the model's convergence and performance. In this paper, we first introduce powerful diffusion models into the federated learning paradigm and show that diffusion representations are effective steers during federated training. To explore the possibility of using diffusion representations in handling data heterogeneity, we propose a novel diffusion-inspired Federated paradigm with Diffusion Representation Collaboration, termed FedDifRC, leveraging meaningful guidance of diffusion models to mitigate data heterogeneity. The key idea is to construct text-driven diffusion contrasting and noise-driven diffusion regularization, aiming to provide abundant class-related semantic information and consistent convergence signals. On the one hand, we exploit the conditional feedback from the diffusion model for different text prompts to build a text-driven contrastive learning strategy. On the other hand, we introduce a noise-driven consistency regularization to align local instances with diffusion denoising representations, constraining the optimization region in the feature space. In addition, FedDifRC can be extended to a self-supervised scheme without relying on any labeled data. We also provide a theoretical analysis for FedDifRC to ensure convergence under non-convex objectives. The experiments on different scenarios validate the effectiveness of FedDifRC and the efficiency of crucial components.