Federated Learning With Dual-End Gradient Correction and Proxy-Free Self-Distillation

In the context of non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) data and limited client participation, repeated iterations of local models in federated learning worsen model drift, resulting in directional bias during global aggregation. Existing single-end optimization approaches, such as client-side regularization or server-side control variables, have difficulty maintaining global-local consistency. To address this, we introduce the Federated Learning with Dual-end Gradient Correction and Proxy-free Self-Distillation (FedDGC-PSD) algorithm. On the client side, a self-distillation mechanism based on historical models constrains local prediction consistency via a Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence loss, mitigating overfitting without the need for external data; concurrently, a gradient correction term aligns local updates with the global direction using historical gradients. On the server, dynamic cross-round gradient correction terms use weighted historical gradients to reduce variance accumulation. Extensive tests were run on five datasets against four benchmark algorithms. Results show FedDGC-PSD outperforms FedAvg, FedProx, SCAFFOLD, and FedDyn by 13.41%, 14.05%, 20.23%, and 3.41%, respectively, on CIFAR-100. In a large-scale scenario with 1,000 clients and 1.5% participation, FedDGC-PSD maintains stable convergence on CIFAR-10, outperforming FedDyn by 17.62%. Ablation studies show that combining the Dual-end Gradient Correction (DGC) and Proxy-free Self-Distillation (PSD) modules improves global model accuracy by about 0.71%, 2.26%, 4.50%, and 6.16% on MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, CIFAR-10, and CIFAR-100, respectively, when compared to using only the DGC module.