Accurate Forgetting for Heterogeneous Federated Continual Learning
To address statistical bias and noise interference arising from client data/task heterogeneity—or even adversarial behavior—in federated continual learning (FCL), this paper introduces the “Accurate Forgetting” (AF) paradigm: proactively identifying and discarding unreliable feature representations induced by skewed distributions and noise prior to knowledge reuse. Methodologically, we propose the first probability-based credibility assessment framework built upon normalized flows, enabling quantifiable, knowledge-granular filtering. Further, we integrate generative replay with selective knowledge inheritance to dynamically enhance global model robustness within the federated architecture. Evaluated on multiple heterogeneous FCL benchmarks, AF achieves an average accuracy improvement of 12.3%, significantly boosting generalization and noise resilience. Our approach provides a novel, interpretable, and computationally tractable pathway for bias mitigation in FCL.