FlashbackCL: Mitigating Temporal Forgetting in Federated Learning

Abstract

Federated Learning (FL) of foundation and edge models increasingly targets deployments where client data distributions drift over time, yet existing forgetting-mitigation methods assume each client's distribution is stationary. Flashback, the strongest recent FL method against cross-client (spatial) forgetting, uses monotonically accumulating per-class label counts as a knowledge proxy; this proxy becomes miscalibrated under temporal distribution shift and anchors the global model to an outdated class balance. We formalise temporal forgetting in FL with a per-phase metric isolated from protocol-level fluctuations and propose Flashback Continual Learning (FlashbackCL), a drop-in extension of Flashback with (i) temporally-decayed label counts; (ii) a device-aware replay buffer with Class-Balanced Reservoir Sampling (CBRS); and (iii) server-side active coreset curation on the public distillation set. The results show that FlashbackCL achieves 6.9% to 10.0% relative improvement relative to Flashback, on CIFAR-10 with 50 clients and three controlled temporal shift modes, while simultaneously reducing temporal forgetting by up to 68%. A 5-variant ablation identifies CBRS replay as the critical component. FlashbackCL also improves Flashback by 3.5 points on stationary CIFAR-100, suggesting that class-balanced replay regularises spatial heterogeneity as well as temporal shift.