From Coordinate Matching to Structural Alignment: Rethinking Prototype Alignment in Heterogeneous Federated Learning

arXiv:2605.05959v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Heterogeneous federated learning (HtFL) aims to enable collaboration among clients that differ in both data distributions and model architectures. Prototype-based methods, which communicate class-level feature centers (prototypes) instead of full model parameters, have recently shown strong potential for HtFL. Existing prototype-based HtFL methods typically reuse the MSE-based or cosine-based alignment mechanism developed for homogeneous FL when al