arXiv Machine Learning

PLayer-FL: A Principled Approach to Personalized Layer-wise Cross-Silo Federated Learning

arXiv:2502. 08829v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Federated learning (FL) with non-IID data often degrades client performance below local training baselines.

arXiv Machine Learning
1d ago

Latent Information Sharing for Accelerating Federated Learning

The paper introduces a latent information sharing scheme for federated learning that mitigates client drift by sharing a small amount of hidden‑layer activations. The authors demonstrate both theoretically and empirically that this approach improves training efficiency while maintaining convergence guarantees and data privacy. Compared to existing methods such as FedProx, SCAFFOLD, FedPVR, FedProto, and SplitFed, the proposed method achieves higher model accuracy within a fixed round budget without adding significant communication overhead.

By Seungjun Lee, Ensieh Khazaei, Dimitrios Hatzinakos, Baturalp Buyukates, Sunwoo Lee
arXiv Machine Learning
1d ago

From Task Mixtures to Specialized Experts

The paper investigates federated learning where each client’s data consists of unknown mixtures of distinct tasks, a scenario termed compound heterogeneity. It shows that when tasks share a common feature geometry, the optimal model for a mixed client is a convex combination of task‑specific models, motivating input‑dependent routing to specialized experts. The authors propose FedSEE, a method that recovers task experts via a convex program and achieves better performance than baselines, reducing negative transfer by 2.9 points overall and 3.7 points for the worst‑served quartile.

By Hojat Allah Salehi, Mehrdad Mahdavi, Andrew Arash Mahyari, M. Hadi Amini
arXiv Machine Learning
1d ago

FedSAP: Federated Learning with Structured Adaptive Partitioning for Multi-Domain Heterogeneous Edge Devices

FedSAP is a federated learning framework that addresses heterogeneous edge devices by using structured pruning as a budget-constrained tri-state channel allocation. It partitions model channels into a Global pool, pseudo-domain-specific Private pools, and a Dropped state, allowing broadly useful features to be shared while isolating domain-sensitive updates. Experiments on Digits and Office-Caltech datasets show FedSAP achieving higher mean global accuracy than the strongest baseline while supporting up to 80% client pruning ratios.

By Wentao Yue, Tianyou Lai, Hongji Li, Qingyu Mao, Qilei Li
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 31

Beyond Non-IID: Learner--Client Distribution Mismatch in Federated Learning

The paper addresses the mismatch between learner and client data distributions in federated learning, noting that traditional client selection methods often ignore this misalignment. It introduces a dynamic, influence-aware client selection framework that uses a small proxy dataset to estimate each client's utility for the learner’s objective, prioritizing informative sources while mitigating noise and heterogeneity. Experiments on CIFAR-10 with heterogeneous partitions show the proposed method outperforms static and dynamic baselines, achieving faster convergence and higher accuracy.

By Yiming Xie, Lili Su, Ningfang Mi
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 2

FlexP-SFT: A Flexible Aggregation-Free Framework for On-Device Personalized Split Federated Fine-Tuning of LLMs

FlexP-SFT introduces an aggregation-free framework for personalized split federated fine-tuning of large language models, eliminating the client-side aggregation step that traditionally causes communication bottlenecks and straggler issues. The method employs a layer‑flexible alignment strategy to balance personalization and generalization without global synchronization, and formulates split‑ratio selection as a resource‑aware discrete optimization problem. Experiments demonstrate that FlexP-SFT improves both accuracy and latency compared to baselines, achieving a superior resource‑accuracy trade‑off.

By Jiaxiang Geng, Tianjun Yuan, Pengchao Han, Ying Gao, Xianhao Chen, Bing Luo
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 15

Pathwise Individual Rationality in Federated Learning: A Mechanism-Architecture Co-Design

The paper investigates the trade‑off between the costs of participating in federated learning (privacy, communication, compute) and the potential gains in model performance, framing this as a game‑theoretic problem of individual rationality versus autarky. It shows that clients can remain below their local‑training baseline for many rounds and that simply capping per‑round contributions harms learning. The authors propose a new mechanism that provides short‑term participation guarantees and personalized model evaluation, demonstrating theoretically and empirically that clients can avoid short‑term losses without significantly harming overall performance, even under moderate heterogeneity.

By Amin Meghrazi, Srinivasan Parthasarathy, Andrew Perrault