Joint Domain-Class Modeling for Federated Learning Under Feature Skew

Abstract

Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative model training without centralizing private data, but performance often degrades under feature skew: clients share labels while the conditional input distributions $p_i(x\!\mid\!y)$ vary due to latent, client-specific appearance factors. We propose Joint Domain-Class Federated Learning (JDFL), a lightweight, optimizer-agnostic extension that makes this latent domain variation usable without sharing raw data. JDFL first infers domain clusters called pseudo-domains from brief local update signals. It then expands the classifier head to output $M\times C$, joint (domain-class) logits. This allows the model to represent domain-conditioned appearance while keeping a shared backbone. To train the expanded head we introduce two complementary supervision strategies based on simple intuitions: a similarity-aware soft-labeling that transfers evidence between nearby inferred domains while allowing domain-specific specialization, and a per-sample randomized target assignment that perturbs supervision across the joint outputs and serves as a low-cost training-time regularizer. JDFL integrates with existing standard FL methods (e.g., FedAvg, SCAFFOLD) with minimal changes. Empirically, both supervision modes consistently improve global test accuracy on standard domain-shifted image benchmarks; ablations and sensitivity studies show the gains stem from the proposed supervision and parametrization rather than mere capacity increase.