Abstract:Federated Learning (FL) emerged as a promising distributed machine learning paradigm. However, extending FL to the class incremental learning scenarios introduces unique challenges: 1) Capacity conflict and catastrophic forgetting from the shared model overloading, 2) Heterogeneity from Non-Independent and Identically Distributed (Non-IID) data, and 3) Synchronized class misalignment. In this paper, we propose \textbf{F}isher-Routed \textbf{M}i\textbf{X}ture of Experts for \textbf{Fed}erated Class-Incremental Learning (\textsc{FedFMX}), a novel framework to address these challenges via adaptive expert specialization across clients. The crucial insight is to route each sample to an expert subset that jointly optimizes knowledge acquisition and retention. Specifically, we introduce a Fisher-Routed Expert Scoring (FRES) module to estimate expert importance via Fisher-based stability cost and gradient-based plasticity gain. Then, we design an Adaptive Expert Selection (AES) module by quantifying marginal contributions for adaptive expert subset determination. Finally, by the routing-aware regularization (RAR), we achieve load balance and efficient FL training. We theoretically prove the $\mathcal{O}(T^{-1})$ convergence rate. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks compared with state-of-the-art methods demonstrate the superiority of \textsc{FedFMX}.
Abstract:Multiple clustering aims to discover diverse latent structures from different perspectives, yet existing methods generate exhaustive clusterings without discerning user interest, necessitating laborious manual screening. Current multi-modal solutions suffer from static semantic rigidity: predefined candidate words fail to adapt to dataset-specific concepts, and fixed fusion strategies ignore evolving feature interactions. To overcome these limitations, we propose Multi-DProxy, a novel multi-modal dynamic proxy learning framework that leverages cross-modal alignment through learnable textual proxies. Multi-DProxy introduces 1) gated cross-modal fusion that synthesizes discriminative joint representations by adaptively modeling feature interactions. 2) dual-constraint proxy optimization where user interest constraints enforce semantic consistency with domain concepts while concept constraints employ hard example mining to enhance cluster discrimination. 3) dynamic candidate management that refines textual proxies through iterative clustering feedback. Therefore, Multi-DProxy not only effectively captures a user's interest through proxies but also enables the identification of relevant clusterings with greater precision. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance with significant improvements over existing methods across a broad set of multi-clustering benchmarks.