# Class-wise Balancing Data Replay for Federated Class-Incremental Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07712 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.07712/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 73 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [Overcoming catastrophic forgetting in neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00796/) (2016)
- [Learning without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09282/) (2016)
- [iCaRL: Incremental Classifier and Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07725/) (2016)
- [Federated Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11473/) (2022)
- [TARGET: Federated Class-Continual Learning via Exemplar-Free Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06937/) (2023)
- [FedGH: Heterogeneous Federated Learning with Generalized Global Header](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13137/) (2023)
- [Better Generative Replay for Continual Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13001/) (2023)
- [No One Left Behind: Real-World Federated Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00903/) (2023)
- [Federated Continual Learning via Knowledge Fusion: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16475/) (2023)
- [A Data-Free Approach to Mitigate Catastrophic Forgetting in Federated Class Incremental Learning for Vision Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07784/) (2023)
- [Federated Incremental Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04620/) (2023)
- [Cross-Silo Prototypical Calibration for Federated Learning with Non-IID Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03457/) (2023)
- [Towards Efficient Replay in Federated Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05890/) (2024)
- [Diffusion-Driven Data Replay: A Novel Approach to Combat Forgetting in Federated Class Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.01128/) (2024)
- [FedCross: Towards Accurate Federated Learning via Multi-Model Cross-Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08285/) (2022)
- [Exploiting Multi-Label Correlation in Label Distribution Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01742/) (2023)
- [Practical Lossless Federated Singular Vector Decomposition over Billion-Scale Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08925/) (2021)
- [Text-Enhanced Data-free Approach for Federated Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14101/) (2024)
- [Unlearning through Knowledge Overwriting: Reversible Federated Unlearning via Selective Sparse Adapter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20709/) (2025)
- [Inaccurate Label Distribution Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13000/) (2023)
- [FedSSA: Semantic Similarity-based Aggregation for Efficient Model-Heterogeneous Personalized Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09006/) (2023)
- [Class-level Structural Relation Modelling and Smoothing for Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04142/) (2023)
- [FedProK: Trustworthy Federated Class-Incremental Learning via Prototypical Feature Knowledge Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.02685/) (2024)
- [SacFL: Self-Adaptive Federated Continual Learning for Resource-Constrained End Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.00365/) (2025)
- [Self-Reinforcing Prototype Evolution with Dual-Knowledge Cooperation for Semi-Supervised Lifelong Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01884/) (2025)
- [Learning Real Facial Concepts for Independent Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.04460/) (2025)
- [FlexFL: Heterogeneous Federated Learning via APoZ-Guided Flexible Pruning in Uncertain Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12729/) (2024)
- [Overcoming Catastrophic Forgetting in Federated Class-Incremental Learning via Federated Global Twin Generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11078/) (2024)
- [Federated Deconfounding and Debiasing Learning for Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.04979/) (2025)
- [Data-Free Federated Class Incremental Learning with Diffusion-Based Generative Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17457/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [From Selection to Scheduling: Federated Geometry-Aware Correction Makes Exemplar Replay Work Better under Continual Dynamic Heterogeneity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.08617/) (2026)
- [Continual Hand-Eye Calibration for Open-world Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.15814/) (2026)
- [Listen, Look, and Learn: Learning Without Forgetting through SAM-Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.10887/) (2026)
- [When Generator Replay Degrades: Projected Rehearsal Orchestration for Heterogeneous Federated Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.15695/) (2026)
- [Fisher-Routed Mixture of Experts for Federated Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.28835/) (2026)
- [HERO: A Heterogeneity-Aware Benchmark Library for Federated Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.08784/) (2026)
- [Continual Learning with Elastic Regularization and Synthetic Replay for Federated MLLM Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.12112/) (2026)
- [Miles: Metric Learning with Expandable Subspace for Pre-Trained Model-Based Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.17593/) (2026)
- [ReSCENE: Server-Side Replay for Structural Mitigation of Catastrophic Forgetting in Federated Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.38833/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Federated Class Incremental Learning (FCIL) aims to collaboratively process continuously increasing incoming tasks across multiple clients. Among various approaches, data replay has become a promising solution, which can alleviate forgetting by reintroducing representative samples from previous tasks. However, their performance is typically limited by class imbalance, both within the replay buffer due to limited global awareness and between replayed and newly arrived classes. To address this issue, we propose a class wise balancing data replay method for FCIL (FedCBDR), which employs a global coordination mechanism for class-level memory construction and reweights the learning objective to alleviate the aforementioned imbalances. Specifically, FedCBDR has two key components: 1) the global-perspective data replay module reconstructs global representations of prior task in a privacy-preserving manner, which then guides a class-aware and importance-sensitive sampling strategy to achieve balanced replay; 2) Subsequently, to handle class imbalance across tasks, the task aware temperature scaling module adaptively adjusts the temperature of logits at both class and instance levels based on task dynamics, which reduces the model's overconfidence in majority classes while enhancing its sensitivity to minority classes. Experimental results verified that FedCBDR achieves balanced class-wise sampling under heterogeneous data distributions and improves generalization under task imbalance between earlier and recent tasks, yielding a 2%-15% Top-1 accuracy improvement over six state-of-the-art methods.
