# Adaptive Federated Distillation for Multi-Domain Non-IID Textual Data

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.20557 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.20557/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.05629/) (2016)
- [Advances and Open Problems in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04977/) (2019)
- [Extracting Training Data from Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07805/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Ensemble Distillation for Robust Model Fusion in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07242/) (2020)
- [FedMD: Heterogenous Federated Learning via Model Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03581/) (2019)
- [A Survey on Federated Learning Systems: Vision, Hype and Reality for Data Privacy and Protection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.09693/) (2019)
- [FedProto: Federated Prototype Learning across Heterogeneous Clients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.00243/) (2021)
- [Federated Learning on Non-IID Data: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06843/) (2021)
- [Communication-Efficient On-Device Machine Learning: Federated Distillation and Augmentation under Non-IID Private Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11479/) (2018)
- [Distillation-Based Semi-Supervised Federated Learning for Communication-Efficient Collaborative Training with Non-IID Private Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.06180/) (2020)
- [Vertical Federated Learning: Concepts, Advances and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12814/) (2022)
- [Cronus: Robust and Heterogeneous Collaborative Learning with Black-Box Knowledge Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.11279/) (2019)
- [FedNLP: Benchmarking Federated Learning Methods for Natural Language Processing Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08815/) (2021)
- [FedFed: Feature Distillation against Data Heterogeneity in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05077/) (2023)
- [Preserving Privacy in Federated Learning with Ensemble Cross-Domain Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.04599/) (2022)
- [Federated Learning Meets Natural Language Processing: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12603/) (2021)
- [Faster Adaptive Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00974/) (2022)
- [FedNER: Privacy-preserving Medical Named Entity Recognition with Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.09288/) (2020)
- [Feature Matching Data Synthesis for Non-IID Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04761/) (2023)
- [FedDKD: Federated Learning with Decentralized Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.00706/) (2022)
- [FedAL: Black-Box Federated Knowledge Distillation Enabled by Adversarial Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16584/) (2023)
- [Collaborating Heterogeneous Natural Language Processing Tasks via Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05789/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Out-of-Distribution Federated Distillation with Domain-Aware Proxy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.08525/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The widespread success of pre-trained language models has established a new training paradigm, where a global PLM is fine-tuned using task-specific data from local clients. The local data are highly different from each other and can not capture the global distribution of the whole data in real world. To address the challenges of non-IID data in real environments, privacy-preserving federated distillation has been proposed and highly investigated. However, previous experimental non-IID scenarios are primarily identified with the label (output) diversity, without considering the diversity of language domains (input) that is crucial in natural language processing. In this paper, we introduce a comprehensive set of multi-domain non-IID scenarios and propose a unified benchmarking framework that includes diverse data. The benchmark can be used to evaluate the federated learning framework in a real environment. To this end, we propose an Adaptive Federated Distillation (AdaFD) framework designed to address multi-domain non-IID challenges in both homogeneous and heterogeneous settings. Experimental results demonstrate that our models capture the diversity of local clients and achieve better performance compared to the existing works. The code for this paper is available at: https://github.com/jiahaoxiao1228/AdaFD.