Federated Edge Inference

Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative model training while preserving data privacy, but its practical deployment is hampered by system and statistical heterogeneity. While federated network pruning offers a path to mitigate these issues, existing methods face a critical dilemma: server-side pruning lacks personalization, whereas client-side pruning is computationally prohibitive for resource-constrained devices. Furthermore, the pruning process itself induces significant parametric divergence among heterogeneous submodels, destabilizing training and hindering global convergence. To address these challenges, we propose SubFLOT, a novel framework for server-side personalized federated pruning. SubFLOT introduces an Optimal Transport-enhanced Pruning (OTP) module that treats historical client models as proxies for local data distributions, formulating the pruning task as a Wasserstein distance minimization problem to generate customized submodels without accessing raw data. Concurrently, to counteract parametric divergence, our Scaling-based Adaptive Regularization (SAR) module adaptively penalizes a submodel's deviation from the global model, with the penalty's strength scaled by the client's pruning rate. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that SubFLOT consistently and substantially outperforms state-of-the-art methods, underscoring its potential for deploying efficient and personalized models on resource-constrained edge devices.

Federated Learning (FL) is plagued by two key challenges: high communication overhead and performance collapse on heterogeneous (non-IID) data. Analytic FL (AFL) provides a single-round, data distribution invariant solution, but is limited to linear models. Subsequent non-linear approaches, like DeepAFL, regain accuracy but sacrifice the single-round benefit. In this work, we break this trade-off. We propose SAFLe, a framework that achieves scalable non-linear expressivity by introducing a structured head of bucketed features and sparse, grouped embeddings. We prove this non-linear architecture is mathematically equivalent to a high-dimensional linear regression. This key equivalence allows SAFLe to be solved with AFL's single-shot, invariant aggregation law. Empirically, SAFLe establishes a new state-of-the-art for analytic FL, significantly outperforming both linear AFL and multi-round DeepAFL in accuracy across all benchmarks, demonstrating a highly efficient and scalable solution for federated vision.

In edge-cloud environments, efficiency of speculative decoding is heavily constrained by uplink transmission and cloud-side verification. In this work, we identify a phenomenon we term credit inertia, where acceptance rates of adjacent token windows exhibit strong temporal consistency. Tokens following recently well-performing windows are likely to pass verification, whereas tokens following poorly performing windows are likely to fail. Motivated by this observation, we propose E^2-SCI, an elastic edge-cloud speculative decoding framework that dynamically adjusts draft token verification thresholds based on recent historical performance. This adaptive mechanism allows system to be more permissive for windows with strong historical performance and stricter for windows with weak performance, effectively leveraging temporal consistency to reduce overall latency. We further introduce Progressive Lookahead Concurrency (PLC), which pipelines draft generation and verification asynchronously to hide latency. Experiments across multiple benchmarks show that E^2-SCI achieves over 9.4 tokens/s on DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen (1.5B/32B), delivering an 88.5% speed improvement over FSD baseline while maintaining accuracy. Notably, E^2-SCI integrates seamlessly with existing frameworks, demonstrating broad applicability and superior efficiency-quality trade-offs.

Omnidirectional image super-resolution (ODISR) remains challenging due to extreme magnification factors (e.g., 8x, 16x) and projection-specific distortions, which degrade edge integrity and limit model performance. This paper proposes an edge-focused framework combined with spherical geometric augmentation to address these issues. Our approach includes an Edge Focused Block (EFB) that integrates spatial-channel attention via Edge Enhanced and Refined Blocks, strengthening edge feature capture and optimization. We also design an Edge-Aware Multi-Scale (EAM) pipeline, leveraging shallow convolutions for initial feature extraction, local modules for deep mining, and a Global Integration Block for multi-scale aggregation, ensuring coherent edge reconstruction in distorted regions. To mitigate data scarcity, we introduce a rotation-translation augmentation strategy based on spherical projections, expanding datasets while preserving scene continuity. Extensive experiments show our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on public datasets.

Exemplar replay has become an effective strategy for mitigating catastrophic forgetting in federated continual learning (FCL) by retaining representative samples from past tasks. Existing studies focus on designing sample-importance estimation mechanisms to identify information-rich samples. However, they typically overlook strategies for effectively utilizing the selected exemplars, which limits their performance under continual dynamic heterogeneity across clients and tasks. To address this issue, this paper proposes a federated geometry-aware correction method, termed FEAT, which alleviates imbalance-induced representation collapse that drags rare-class features toward frequent classes across clients. Specifically, it consists of two key modules: 1) the Geometric Structure Alignment module performs structural knowledge distillation by aligning the pairwise angular similarities between feature representations and their corresponding Equiangular Tight Frame prototypes, which are fixed and shared across clients to serve as a class-discriminative reference structure. This encourages geometric consistency across tasks and helps mitigate representation drift; 2) the Energy-based Geometric Correction module removes task-irrelevant directional components from feature embeddings, which reduces prediction bias toward majority classes. This improves sensitivity to minority classes and enhances the model's robustness under class-imbalanced data distributions. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that FEAT substantially achieves a 4%-8% improvement in Top-1 accuracy compared to nine state-of-the-art methods.