arXiv AI

CovFedAvg: Local Low-Loss Curves and Federated Model Selection

arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 8

ORDERS: An Empirical Study of Norm-Rank Aggregation for Personalized Federated Learning

ORDERS is a personalized federated learning configuration that combines a shared backbone, private residual adapters, and a classifier, using geometric weights based on descending update norms, feature alignment, and private‑parameter perturbations. In extensive experiments on CIFAR‑10 and Sent140, ORDERS achieves slightly higher mean client accuracy than baseline methods, with a 5.47% reduction in parameter payload. Ablation studies show limited, dataset‑dependent benefits from norm ranking and alignment, and no clear advantage from perturbations.

By Koffka Khan
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 23

Is High Local Accuracy Enough? Geometric Consensus with Support-Adaptive Statistical Personalization for Federated Learning

The paper introduces FedGRC, a federated learning framework that enhances both global recognition and personalization for heterogeneous clients. It combines Consensus‑Guided Representation Learning, Multilayer Metric Synthesis, and Support‑Adaptive Shrinkage Personalization to address failures on rare or unseen classes. Experiments on CIFAR‑10, CIFAR‑100, and the FedRS dataset show that FedGRC outperforms 21 baseline methods, improving global accuracy and personalization floors by over 2% in several settings.

By Junyu Lin, Bosong Qi, Pengcheng Shi, Jiayuan Li
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 3

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
Sep 7

PACE: Propagation-Aware Collaborative Correction for One-Shot Personalized Federated Graph Learning

PACE introduces a propagation‑aware collaborative correction for one‑shot personalized federated graph learning. Each client sends a rank‑r update and a diagonal sketch of message moments, allowing the server to construct a correction that anchors to the receiver’s local model. A convex negative‑log‑likelihood calibration selects a single coefficient to blend local and external logits, improving accuracy and weighted‑F1 on most datasets while preserving local predictions when the correction is unhelpful.

By Ruizhe Huang, Chengran Li, Xiaochuan Shi
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 14

Large Distant Gradients Need Not Be Reliable: reliability-weighted credit assignment for long-horizon autoregressive forecasting

The paper introduces Internal Dual-Wiener routing (Internal‑DW), a backward‑only method that weight‑balances internal gradient routes in autoregressive forecasting. By estimating bounded Wiener gains for identity and nonlinear paths, it suppresses unpredictable noise while preserving predictable learning signals, reducing forecast error by 5.2%–13.8% on four weak‑drive testbeds compared to full BPTT and outperforming gradient clipping, Jacobian regularization, and truncated BPTT in most cases. The approach shows that long‑horizon supervision can be effective without trusting every backward gradient equally.

By Junhao Zhao, David Michael Simberg, Jacob Kang, Colin Connor Kurniawan, Nan Xu
arXiv AI
Aug 11

Multimodal Federated Learning under Dual-Axis Modality Missingness

arXiv:2608. 09240v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal federated learning (FL) supports collaborative modeling in privacy-sensitive health-sensing and medical settings, but realistic deployments often exhibit dual-axis modality missingness: clients have different modality sets, and individual samples may contain only subsets of the modalities available locally.

By Adiba Orzikulova, Jaehyun Kwak, Jaemin Shin, Yunqi Guo, Xiaomin Ouyang, Guoliang Xing, Steven Euijong Whang, Sung-Ju Lee
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 3

Local Superior Soups: A Catalyst for Model Merging in Cross-Silo Federated Learning

The paper introduces Local Superior Soups, a model‑interpolation based local training technique designed to improve the adaptation of large pre‑trained models in cross‑silo federated learning. By encouraging exploration of a connected low‑loss basin through regularized interpolation, the method reduces the number of communication rounds needed and boosts performance across several widely used FL datasets. The authors provide code for reproducibility.

By Minghui Chen, Meirui Jiang, Xin Zhang, Qi Dou, Zehua Wang, Xiaoxiao Li
arXiv AI
4d ago

Dr. Post-Training: A Data Regularization Perspective on LLM Post-Training

The paper introduces Dr. Post-Training, a framework that treats general training data as a data‑induced regularizer to prevent overfitting to scarce target objectives, rather than merely a pool for selection. It constructs a feasible set of model update directions from general data and projects target‑driven updates onto this set, unifying standard training and existing data‑selection methods as special cases along a bias‑variance spectrum. Experiments on SFT, RLHF, and RLVR demonstrate that these methods outperform both standard training and state‑of‑the‑art data‑selection baselines, especially when general and target data are highly misaligned, while system optimizations keep overhead minimal.

By Pingbang Hu, Xueshen Liu, Z. Morley Mao, Jiaqi W. Ma