Previous work has achieved encouraging performance.

Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for collaborative machine learning, while preserving user data privacy. Despite its potential, standard FL algorithms lack support for diverse heterogeneous device prototypes, which vary significantly in model and dataset sizes--from small IoT devices to large workstations. This limitation is only partially addressed by existing knowledge distillation (KD) techniques, which often fail to transfer knowledge effectively across a broad spectrum of device prototypes with varied capabilities. This failure primarily stems from two issues: the dilution of informative logits from more capable devices by those from less capable ones, and the use of a single integrated logits as the distillation target across all devices, which neglects their individual learning capacities and and the unique contributions of each device. To address these challenges, we introduce T AKFL, a novel KD-based framework that treats the knowledge transfer from each device prototype's ensemble as a separate task, independently distilling each to preserve its unique contributions and avoid dilution. T AKFL also incorporates a KD-based self-regularization technique to mitigate the issues related to the noisy and unsupervised ensemble distillation process. To integrate the separately distilled knowledge, we introduce an adaptive task arithmetic knowledge integration process, allowing each student model to customize the knowledge integration for optimal performance.

DSN primarily seeks to transfer knowledge to the new coming task from the learned tasks by selecting the affiliated weights of a small set of neurons to be activated, including the reused neurons from prior tasks via neuron-wise masks. And it also transfers possibly valuable knowledge to the earlier tasks via data-free replay.

We identify a natural and necessary condition called the "Optimal

Although theteacher haslearned rich and powerful representations, it also contains unignorable bias knowledge which is usually induced by the context prior (e.g., background) in the training data.