Text-Enhanced Data-free Approach for Federated Class-Incremental Learning

Federated Class-Incremental Learning (FCIL) is an underexplored yet pivotal issue, involving the dynamic addition of new classes in the context of federated learning. In this field, Data-Free Knowledge Transfer (DFKT) plays a crucial role in addressing catastrophic forgetting and data privacy problems. However, prior approaches lack the crucial synergy between DFKT and the model training phases, causing DFKT to encounter difficulties in generating high-quality data from a non-anchored latent space of the old task model. In this paper, we introduce LANDER (Label Text Centered Data-Free Knowledge Transfer) to address this issue by utilizing label text embeddings (LTE) produced by pretrained language models. Specifically, during the model training phase, our approach treats LTE as anchor points and constrains the feature embeddings of corresponding training samples around them, enriching the surrounding area with more meaningful information. In the DFKT phase, by using these LTE anchors, LANDER can synthesize more meaningful samples, thereby effectively addressing the forgetting problem. Additionally, instead of tightly constraining embeddings toward the anchor, the Bounding Loss is introduced to encourage sample embeddings to remain flexible within a defined radius. This approach preserves the natural differences in sample embeddings and mitigates the embedding overlap caused by heterogeneous federated settings. Extensive experiments conducted on CIFAR100, Tiny-ImageNet, and ImageNet demonstrate that LANDER significantly outperforms previous methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance in FCIL. The code is available at https://github.com/tmtuan1307/lander.

Unleash Data Generation for Efficient and Effective Data-free Knowledge Distillation

Data-Free Knowledge Distillation (DFKD) has recently made remarkable advancements with its core principle of transferring knowledge from a teacher neural network to a student neural network without requiring access to the original data. Nonetheless, existing approaches encounter a significant challenge when attempting to generate samples from random noise inputs, which inherently lack meaningful information. Consequently, these models struggle to effectively map this noise to the ground-truth sample distribution, resulting in the production of low-quality data and imposing substantial time requirements for training the generator. In this paper, we propose a novel Noisy Layer Generation method (NAYER) which relocates the randomness source from the input to a noisy layer and utilizes the meaningful label-text embedding (LTE) as the input. The significance of LTE lies in its ability to contain substantial meaningful inter-class information, enabling the generation of high-quality samples with only a few training steps. Simultaneously, the noisy layer plays a key role in addressing the issue of diversity in sample generation by preventing the model from overemphasizing the constrained label information. By reinitializing the noisy layer in each iteration, we aim to facilitate the generation of diverse samples while still retaining the method's efficiency, thanks to the ease of learning provided by LTE. Experiments carried out on multiple datasets demonstrate that our NAYER not only outperforms the state-of-the-art methods but also achieves speeds 5 to 15 times faster than previous approaches.