RIPPLE in Still Water: Zero-Shot Clustering in Federated Learning with Wavelet Scattering Transform

תקציר מקורי באנגליתarXiv:2610.03054v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Clustered Federated Learning (FL) partitions a client population into groups of similar local distributions and trains one specialized model per cluster, mitigating client drift that degrades single-model methods under non-IID data. Prior methods discover cluster structure inside the training loop through gradient similarity, loss evaluation, or EM-style updates, thus increasing communication overhead, exposing gradients to inversion attacks, and providing no mechanism to assign clients absent from training. We propose RIPPLE, a clustered FL framework in which cluster assignment is computed entirely offline from a spectral characterization of each client's local data: a variance-weighted principal-component prototype embedded via the Wavelet