HePCo: Data-Free Heterogeneous Prompt Consolidation for Continual
  Federated Learning
Shaunak Halbe James Seale Smith Junjiao Tian Zsolt Kira
In this paper, we focus on the important yet understudied problem of
Continual Federated Learning (CFL), where a server communicates with a set of
clients to incrementally learn new concepts over time without sharing or
storing any data. The complexity of this problem is compounded by challenges
from both the Continual and Federated Learning perspectives. Specifically,
models trained in a CFL setup suffer from catastrophic forgetting which is
exacerbated by data heterogeneity across clients. Existing attempts at this
problem tend to impose large overheads on clients and communication channels or
require access to stored data which renders them unsuitable for real-world use
due to privacy. In this paper, we attempt to tackle forgetting and
heterogeneity while minimizing overhead costs and without requiring access to
any stored data. We achieve this by leveraging a prompting based approach (such
that only prompts and classifier heads have to be communicated) and proposing a
novel and lightweight generation and distillation scheme to consolidate client
models at the server. We formulate this problem for image classification and
establish strong baselines for comparison, conduct experiments on CIFAR-100 as
well as challenging, large-scale datasets like ImageNet-R and DomainNet. Our
approach outperforms both existing methods and our own baselines by as much as
7% while significantly reducing communication and client-level computation
costs.