Federated Learning Survey: A Multi-Level Taxonomy of Aggregation Techniques, Experimental Insights, and Future Frontiers
It addresses the problem of decentralized and privacy-preserving machine learning for researchers and practitioners, but it is incremental as a survey paper.
This survey tackles the challenges of data privacy and heterogeneity in Federated Learning (FL) by providing a structured taxonomy of aggregation techniques, experimental comparisons under IID and non-IID data, and future research directions.
The integration of IoT and AI has unlocked innovation across industries, but growing privacy concerns and data isolation hinder progress. Traditional centralized ML struggles to overcome these challenges, which has led to the rise of Federated Learning (FL), a decentralized paradigm that enables collaborative model training without sharing local raw data. FL ensures data privacy, reduces communication overhead, and supports scalability, yet its heterogeneity adds complexity compared to centralized approaches. This survey focuses on three main FL research directions: personalization, optimization, and robustness, offering a structured classification through a hybrid methodology that combines bibliometric analysis with systematic review to identify the most influential works. We examine challenges and techniques related to heterogeneity, efficiency, security, and privacy, and provide a comprehensive overview of aggregation strategies, including architectures, synchronization methods, and diverse federation objectives. To complement this, we discuss practical evaluation approaches and present experiments comparing aggregation methods under IID and non-IID data distributions. Finally, we outline promising research directions to advance FL, aiming to guide future innovation in this rapidly evolving field.