Federated Soft Clustering via Generalized Total Variation Minimization

Abstract

We study federated soft clustering over federated learning (FL) networks of devices that each hold a private local dataset and fit a personalized Gaussian mixture model (GMM). Generalized total variation minimization (GTVMin) couples the local maximum likelihood problems through a graph regularizer that penalizes a discrepancy between the models of connected nodes. The choice of discrepancy measure is a key design decision: we compare a squared Euclidean distance between model parameters, which requires component matching, with two measures that compare the local model distributions directly and hence need no matching: a Monte-Carlo approximated Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence and a closed-form maximum mean discrepancy (MMD). All three resulting GTVMin instances are optimized by synchronous projected gradient updates; for the smooth MMD instance we provide a convergence guarantee to stationary points. We characterize their computational cost and evaluate their robustness to data heterogeneity.

submitted to ICASSP '27