Clustered Federated Learning for Networks

A special issue of Future Internet (ISSN 1999-5903). This special issue belongs to the section "Cybersecurity".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 20 August 2026 | Viewed by 405

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
Institute of Information Science and Technologies of the National Research Council of Italy (ISTI-CNR), Via G. Moruzzi, 1, 56124 Pisa, Italy
Interests: clustering; multi-view learning; federated learning

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Guest Editor
Department of Applied Mathematics, Chung Yuan Christian University, Taoyuan 32023, Taiwan
Interests: fuzzy clustering; machine learning and pattern recognition; image segmentation; industrial systems; statistic applications
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Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue of Future Internet, “Clustered Federated Learning for Networks,” aims to gather cutting-edge research on federated learning, with a particular emphasis on clustering techniques and their application in networked systems.

As privacy concerns and data regulations become increasingly stringent, federated learning emerges as a crucial paradigm that enables collaborative machine learning without compromising data privacy. Clustering techniques further enhance this capacity by improving efficiency, reducing communication costs, and enabling personalized models for heterogeneous participants.

This Issue will explore clustered federated learning, a method that boosts the efficiency and scalability of federated systems by grouping participants with similar characteristics.

We invite researchers and practitioners to submit original research articles, comprehensive reviews, and insightful case studies that tackle current challenges, propose innovative solutions, and outline future research directions in clustered federated learning for networks. We invite submissions covering the following areas (but not limited to) the following areas:

  • Algorithmic Innovations
  • Novel clustering algorithms for federated learning
  • Adaptive clustering strategies
  • Hierarchical federated learning architectures
  • Privacy & Security
  • Privacy-preserving clustering mechanisms
  • Differential privacy in clustered FL
  • Secure aggregation protocols
  • System Optimization
  • Communication-efficient algorithms
  • Resource allocation and scheduling
  • Heterogeneity handling strategies
  • Network Applications
  • IoT and edge computing scenarios
  • Mobile and wireless networks
  • Multi-access edge computing (MEC)
  • Performance Analysis
  • Convergence analysis and guarantees
  • Robustness and fault tolerance
  • Scalability studies

Dr. Kristina P. Sinaga
Prof. Dr. Miin-shen Yang
Guest Editors

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Keywords

  • clustered federated learning
  • federated learning
  • machine learning clustering
  • decentralized learning
  • networked systems
  • IoT and edge computing
  • multi-view learning
  • network optimization
  • privacy-preserving AI
  • scalable machine learning
  • distributed algorithms
  • communication efficiency
  • heterogeneous networks
  • secure aggregation

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

21 pages, 2519 KB  
Article
Efficient Lightweight Image Classification via Coordinate Attention and Channel Pruning for Resource-Constrained Systems
by Yao-Liang Chung
Future Internet 2025, 17(11), 489; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi17110489 - 25 Oct 2025
Viewed by 185
Abstract
Image classification is central to computer vision, supporting applications from autonomous driving to medical imaging, yet state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks remain constrained by heavy floating-point operations (FLOPs) and parameter counts on edge devices. To address this accuracy–efficiency trade-off, we propose a unified lightweight [...] Read more.
Image classification is central to computer vision, supporting applications from autonomous driving to medical imaging, yet state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks remain constrained by heavy floating-point operations (FLOPs) and parameter counts on edge devices. To address this accuracy–efficiency trade-off, we propose a unified lightweight framework built on a pruning-aware coordinate attention block (PACB). PACB integrates coordinate attention (CA) with L1-regularized channel pruning, enriching feature representation while enabling structured compression. Applied to MobileNetV3 and RepVGG, the framework achieves substantial efficiency gains. On GTSRB, MobileNetV3 parameters drop from 16.239 M to 9.871 M (–6.37 M) and FLOPs from 11.297 M to 8.552 M (–24.3%), with accuracy improving from 97.09% to 97.37%. For RepVGG, parameters fall from 7.683 M to 7.093 M (–0.59 M) and FLOPs from 31.264 M to 27.918 M (–3.35 M), with only ~0.51% average accuracy loss across CIFAR-10, Fashion-MNIST, and GTSRB. Complexity analysis further confirms PACB does not increase asymptotic order, since the additional CA operations contribute only lightweight lower-order terms. These results demonstrate that coupling CA with structured pruning yields a scalable accuracy–efficiency trade-off under hardware-agnostic metrics, making PACB a promising, deployment-ready solution for mobile and edge applications. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Clustered Federated Learning for Networks)
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