# Fed-BRDECS: Privacy-Preserving and Heterogeneity-Aware Federated Deep Embedded Clustering

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07399 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.07399/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Oct 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Fashion-MNIST: a Novel Image Dataset for Benchmarking Machine Learning Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07747/) (2017)
- [Measuring the Effects of Non-Identical Data Distribution for Federated Visual Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.06335/) (2019)
- [Deep Learning for Classical Japanese Literature](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01718/) (2018)
- [Deep Temporal Clustering : Fully Unsupervised Learning of Time-Domain Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01059/) (2018)
- [Towards Federated Clustering: A Federated Fuzzy c-Means Algorithm (FFCM)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.07316/) (2022)
- [CCFC: Bridging Federated Clustering and Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06634/) (2024)
- [Dynamically Weighted Federated k-Means](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14858/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Federated deep clustering seeks to learn clustering-friendly representations from decentralized unlabeled data while preserving client privacy. However, Deep Embedded Clustering (DEC)-style objectives depend on global soft-assignment statistics that require clients to reveal their sensitive information. We propose Fed-BRDECS, a privacy-preserving and heterogeneity-aware federated deep embedded clustering framework. Fed-BRDECS replaces the globally normalized clustering objective with a locally computable sample-stability loss, avoiding the transmission of local soft-assignment distributions. To tackle non-IID client distributions, we introduce prediction-balanced sampling, which oversamples locally rare predicted clusters without requiring ground-truth labels, and centroid-level restarting, which periodically refreshes biased or inactive centroids. Experiments on image and text clustering benchmarks show that Fed-BRDECS consistently outperforms representative federated clustering and deep clustering baselines under both IID and non-IID partitions. We further demonstrate its applicability to federated time-series anomaly detection, where it improves reconstruction-based detectors without adding inference-time cost.