Federated Continual Learning as a Distributed Drift-Plus-Penalty Control Problem

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21539v1
• Date: Fri, 21 Aug 2026 18:21:19 GMT
• Title: Federated Continual Learning as a Distributed Drift-Plus-Penalty Control Problem
• Abstract summary: Federated Continual Learning (FCL) is fundamental to real-world distributed learning systems.<n>FCL requires models to adapt to sequential, non-IID data across clients while mitigating catastrophic forgetting and client drift.<n>We propose Federated Queue-regulated Continual Learning (FedQCL), a framework based on Lynov drift-plus-penalty (DPP) optimization.
• Score: 12.498691027665332
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Federated Continual Learning (FCL) is fundamental to real-world distributed learning systems, requiring models to adapt to sequential, non-IID data across clients while mitigating catastrophic forgetting and client drift. Existing approaches formulate continual learning (CL) as a sequence of per-task optimization problems, applied locally at each client and coupled through aggregation, using heuristic mechanisms such as replay, regularization, or projection-based constraints. However, forgetting in FCL is inherently a long-term, distributed phenomenon, arising from the interaction of temporal task evolution and cross-client heterogeneity, which is not explicitly regulated. In this work, we cast FCL as a stochastic control problem and propose Federated Queue-regulated Continual Learning (FedQCL), a framework based on Lyapunov drift-plus-penalty (DPP) optimization. FedQCL introduces virtual queues to track the accumulation of forgetting across tasks and clients, enabling explicit control of the stability-plasticity trade-off. By optimizing a DPP objective, the method jointly improves current-task performance while the queue-based formulation provides an interpretable and tunable mechanism to balance adaptation and retention through a single parameter, without requiring gradient projection or additional communication overhead. Empirical evaluations on standard benchmarks, including Split-CIFAR-10, Split-CIFAR-100, and Split-TinyImageNet, demonstrate that FedQCL outperforms state-of-the-art baselines with respect to accuracy while significantly reducing forgetting under heterogeneous data distributions.

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