This paper presents FedAlign, a Federated Learning (FL) framework particularly designed for System Identification (SYSID) tasks by aligning state representations. Local workers can learn State-Space Models (SSMs) with equivalent representations but different dynamics. We demonstrate that directly aggregating these local SSMs via FedAvg results in a global model with altered system dynamics. FedAlign overcomes this problem by employing similarity transformation matrices to align state representations of local SSMs, thereby establishing a common parameter basin that retains the dynamics of local SSMs. FedAlign computes similarity transformation matrices via two distinct approaches: FedAlign-A and FedAlign-O. In FedAlign-A, we represent the global SSM in controllable canonical form (CCF). We apply control theory to analytically derive similarity transformation matrices that convert each local SSM into this form. Yet, establishing global SSM in CCF brings additional alignment challenges in multi input - multi output SYSID as CCF representation is not unique, unlike in single input - single output SYSID. In FedAlign-O, we address these alignment challenges by reformulating the local parameter basin alignment problem as an optimization task. We determine the parameter basin of a local worker as the common parameter basin and solve least square problems to obtain similarity transformation matrices needed to align the remaining local SSMs. Through the experiments conducted on synthetic and real-world datasets, we show that FedAlign outperforms FedAvg, converges faster, and provides improved stability of the global SSM thanks to the efficient alignment of local parameter basins.

Federated Learning (FL) offers a decentralized paradigm for collaborative model training without direct data sharing, yet it poses unique challenges for Domain Generalization (DG), including strict privacy constraints, non-i.i.d. local data, and limited domain diversity. We introduce FedAlign, a lightweight, privacy-preserving framework designed to enhance DG in federated settings by simultaneously increasing feature diversity and promoting domain invariance. First, a cross-client feature extension module broadens local domain representations through domain-invariant feature perturbation and selective cross-client feature transfer, allowing each client to safely access a richer domain space. Second, a dual-stage alignment module refines global feature learning by aligning both feature embeddings and predictions across clients, thereby distilling robust, domain-invariant features. By integrating these modules, our method achieves superior generalization to unseen domains while maintaining data privacy and operating with minimal computational and communication overhead.

Federated Learning (FL) is a distributed machine learning approach to learn models on decentralized heterogeneous data, without the need for clients to share their data. Many existing FL approaches assume that all clients have equal importance and construct a global objective based on all clients. We consider a version of FL we call Prioritized FL, where the goal is to learn a weighted mean objective of a subset of clients, designated as priority clients. An important question arises: How do we choose and incentivize well aligned non priority clients to participate in the federation, while discarding misaligned clients? We present FedALIGN (Federated Adaptive Learning with Inclusion of Global Needs) to address this challenge. The algorithm employs a matching strategy that chooses non priority clients based on how similar the models loss is on their data compared to the global data, thereby ensuring the use of non priority client gradients only when it is beneficial for priority clients. This approach ensures mutual benefits as non priority clients are motivated to join when the model performs satisfactorily on their data, and priority clients can utilize their updates and computational resources when their goals align. We present a convergence analysis that quantifies the trade off between client selection and speed of convergence. Our algorithm shows faster convergence and higher test accuracy than baselines for various synthetic and benchmark datasets.

Traditional federated classification methods, even those designed for non-IID clients, assume that each client annotates its local data with respect to the same universal class set. In this paper, we focus on a more general yet practical setting, non-identical client class sets, where clients focus on their own (different or even non-overlapping) class sets and seek a global model that works for the union of these classes. If one views classification as finding the best match between representations produced by data/label encoder, such heterogeneity in client class sets poses a new significant challenge -- local encoders at different clients may operate in different and even independent latent spaces, making it hard to aggregate at the server. We propose a novel framework, FedAlign, to align the latent spaces across clients from both label and data perspectives. From a label perspective, we leverage the expressive natural language class names as a common ground for label encoders to anchor class representations and guide the data encoder learning across clients. From a data perspective, during local training, we regard the global class representations as anchors and leverage the data points that are close/far enough to the anchors of locally-unaware classes to align the data encoders across clients. Our theoretical analysis of the generalization performance and extensive experiments on four real-world datasets of different tasks confirm that FedAlign outperforms various state-of-the-art (non-IID) federated classification methods.

Federated learning (FL) has attracted increasing attention in recent years. As a privacy-preserving collaborative learning paradigm, it enables a broader range of applications, especially for computer vision and natural language processing tasks. However, to date, there is limited research of federated learning on relational data, namely Knowledge Graph (KG). In this work, we present a modified version of the graph neural network algorithm that performs federated modeling over KGs across different participants. Specifically, to tackle the inherent data heterogeneity issue and inefficiency in algorithm convergence, we propose a novel optimization algorithm, named FedAlign, with 1) optimal transportation (OT) for on-client personalization and 2) weight constraint to speed up the convergence. Extensive experiments have been conducted on several widely used datasets. Empirical results show that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art FL methods, such as FedAVG and FedProx, with better convergence.