Fed-BRDECS: Privacy-Preserving and Heterogeneity-Aware Federated Deep Embedded Clustering

Abstract

Federated deep clustering seeks to learn clustering-friendly representations from decentralized unlabeled data while preserving client privacy. However, Deep Embedded Clustering (DEC)-style objectives depend on global soft-assignment statistics that require clients to reveal their sensitive information. We propose Fed-BRDECS, a privacy-preserving and heterogeneity-aware federated deep embedded clustering framework. Fed-BRDECS replaces the globally normalized clustering objective with a locally computable sample-stability loss, avoiding the transmission of local soft-assignment distributions. To tackle non-IID client distributions, we introduce prediction-balanced sampling, which oversamples locally rare predicted clusters without requiring ground-truth labels, and centroid-level restarting, which periodically refreshes biased or inactive centroids. Experiments on image and text clustering benchmarks show that Fed-BRDECS consistently outperforms representative federated clustering and deep clustering baselines under both IID and non-IID partitions. We further demonstrate its applicability to federated time-series anomaly detection, where it improves reconstruction-based detectors without adding inference-time cost.