Paperdoi:10.3390/s26217005

FedREPA: Relation-Enhanced Prototype Alignment for Heterogeneous Federated Human Activity Recognition

Venue listed2026Added Nov 5, 2026

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Authors: Rongbo Zhou, Jiao Tian, Liejun Wang

Sensors 26(21), 7005 (published 2026-11-05)

TL;DR

Federated HAR with wearable sensors under label-skewed clients, missing local activities, and scarce mini-batch negatives. FedREPA couples missing-class-aware relation consistency with prototype contrastive learning: clients build an inter-class relation prior from shared global class prototypes; a masked relation-consistency loss matches supported local relation rows to that prior; the prior also reweights negatives in the prototype contrastive loss. Global prototypes supply cross-client positives/negatives (including for activities absent locally).

Abstract

Federated human activity recognition (HAR) with wearable sensors is challenged by label-skewed client data, missing local activities, and scarce mini-batch negatives. We propose FedREPA, a relation-guided framework that couples missing-class-aware relation consistency with prototype contrastive learning. Clients derive an inter-class relation prior from shared global class prototypes. A masked relation-consistency loss matches supported local relation rows to this prior. The same prior reweights negative classes in the prototype contrastive loss, giving greater emphasis to nearby prototypes when trust is held fixed. Global prototypes provide cross-client positive and negative anchors, including negatives for activities absent locally. On UCI HAR, PAMAP2, CIFAR-10, and CIFAR-100 under simulated Dirichlet label skew, FedREPA records the highest observed mean global test accuracy in the comparison with the ten evaluated baselines at each tested Dirichlet level, using the last five evaluation points per run. FedTGP, FedDPA, and FedAli-PHAR were not evaluated, and no performance advantage over them is claimed. Its paired accuracy margin over the restricted FedGPS-Core baseline averages about one percentage point. Worst-client accuracy is also highest among the methods shown on UCI HAR and CIFAR-10, while selected-class recall on CIFAR-10 shows mixed results. These findings are descriptive comparisons under the evaluated Dirichlet label-skew protocol. Performance under subject-wise federated partitions, device-wise heterogeneity, and sensor-placement variation remains unvalidated, as does clinical applicability.

Verbatim from the publisher's DOI record (opens in a new tab) · Publisher licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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Tasks & signals

Tasks

Activity recognition

Signals

Keywords

HARFederated LearningPrototype ContrastiveLabel SkewUCI HARPAMAP2

Datasets used

How it works

How Method works: Setup → Method → TargetSetup: Signals (IMU). Method: Method (Contrastive learning). Target: Activity recognition.SetupSignals: IMUxyzSignalsIMUMethodMethodContrastive learningTargetActivity recognitionActivity recognition

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Zhou, R., Tian, J., & Wang, L. (2026). FedREPA: Relation-Enhanced Prototype Alignment for Heterogeneous Federated Human Activity Recognition. Sensors 26, 7005. https://doi.org/10.3390/s26217005
Zhou, Rongbo, Jiao Tian, and Liejun Wang. 2026. "FedREPA: Relation-Enhanced Prototype Alignment for Heterogeneous Federated Human Activity Recognition." Sensors 26, 7005. https://doi.org/10.3390/s26217005.
Zhou, R., Tian, J. and Wang, L. (2026) 'FedREPA: Relation-Enhanced Prototype Alignment for Heterogeneous Federated Human Activity Recognition', Sensors 26, 7005. doi: 10.3390/s26217005.
Zhou, Rongbo, et al. "FedREPA: Relation-Enhanced Prototype Alignment for Heterogeneous Federated Human Activity Recognition." Sensors 26, 7005, 2026. https://doi.org/10.3390/s26217005.
R. Zhou, J. Tian, and L. Wang, "FedREPA: Relation-Enhanced Prototype Alignment for Heterogeneous Federated Human Activity Recognition," Sensors 26, 7005, 2026, doi: 10.3390/s26217005.
@article{zhou2026fedrepa,
  title         = {{FedREPA: Relation-Enhanced Prototype Alignment for Heterogeneous Federated Human Activity Recognition}},
  author        = {Zhou, Rongbo and Tian, Jiao and Wang, Liejun},
  year          = {2026},
  journal       = {Sensors 26, 7005},
  doi           = {10.3390/s26217005}
}

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