Communication-Efficient Federated Domain Generalization in Edge Networks via Dynamic Prototype Regulation

Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a transformative distributed learning paradigm in the era of Internet of Things (IoT), reconceptualizing data processing methodologies. However, FL systems face significant communication bottlenecks due to inevitable client-server data exchanges and long-distance transmissions. This work presents EdgeFLow, an innovative FL framework that redesigns the system topology by replacing traditional cloud servers with sequential model migration between edge base stations. By conducting model aggregation and propagation exclusively at edge clusters, EdgeFLow eliminates cloud-based transmissions and substantially reduces global communication overhead. We provide rigorous convergence analysis for EdgeFLow under non-convex objectives and non-IID data distributions, extending classical FL convergence theory. Experimental results across various configurations validate the theoretical analysis, demonstrating that EdgeFLow achieves comparable accuracy improvements while significantly reducing communication costs. As a systemic architectural innovation for communication-efficient FL, EdgeFLow establishes a foundational framework for future developments in IoT and edge-network learning systems.

Agentic AI systems are reshaping communications and networking by deploying autonomous intelligent agents capable of collaborative learning while maintaining data privacy at network edges. Within distributed network environments, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) serve as cognitive engines for edge devices, yet federated fine-tuning faces substantial challenges in balancing global knowledge aggregation with local adaptation under heterogeneous network conditions. Conventional federated protocols typically rely on uniform parameter aggregation, which conflates domain-invariant features with client-specific nuances, thereby resulting in suboptimal personalization and excessive communication overhead. To address these challenges, we propose PFAdapter, a communication-efficient framework introducing hierarchical LoRA decomposition to explicitly separate adapter parameters into global-shared and local-private components. Query and key projections are assigned to global synchronization for capturing universal multimodal semantics across the network, while value and output projections remain localized for edge-specific adaptation. Additionally, orthogonality regularization based on the Frobenius norm enforces strict separation between these components, preventing redundant feature learning. Selective aggregation protocols synchronize only global-shared components across the federated network, preserving local expertise and reducing communication costs by nearly 50%. Extensive experiments on VQA-RAD, SLAKE, Hateful Memes, and CrisisMMD datasets demonstrate that PFAdapter consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving accuracy improvements ranging from 2.4% to 4.8% across diverse edge intelligence tasks. Consequently, our framework establishes an efficient solution for agentic AI deployment in resource-constrained communication networks.

Federated Learning (FL) enables distributed model training on edge devices while preserving data privacy. However, clients tend to have non-Independent and Identically Distributed (non-IID) data, which often leads to client-drift, and therefore diminishing convergence speed and model performance. While adaptive optimizers have been proposed to mitigate these effects, they frequently introduce computational complexity or communication overhead unsuitable for resource-constrained IoT environments. This paper introduces Federated Zero Mean Gradients (FedZMG), a novel, parameter-free, client-side optimization algorithm designed to tackle client-drift by structurally regularizing the optimization space. Advancing the idea of Gradient Centralization, FedZMG projects local gradients onto a zero-mean hyperplane, effectively neutralizing the "intensity" or "bias" shifts inherent in heterogeneous data distributions without requiring additional communication or hyperparameter tuning. A theoretical analysis is provided, proving that FedZMG reduces the effective gradient variance and guarantees tighter convergence bounds compared to standard FedAvg. Extensive empirical evaluations on EMNIST, CIFAR100, and Shakespeare datasets demonstrate that FedZMG achieves better convergence speed and final validation accuracy compared to the baseline FedAvg and the adaptive optimizer FedAdam, particularly in highly non-IID settings.