BLEND: Balancing Personalization vs. Generalization in Federated Vision-Language Models

Title:BLEND: Balancing Personalization vs. Generalization in Federated Vision-Language Models

Abstract:Federated vision-language models (FedVLMs) represent one of the emerging frontiers of machine learning, aiming to integrate federated learning within the fine-tuning pipelines of vision-language models (VLMs). In this work, we introduce BLEND, a new framework designed to jointly enhance the personalization and generalization capabilities of FedVLMs. BLEND proposes a selective VLM parameter fine-tuning and aggregation strategy that consists of (i) global vision and text adapters shared across clients, and (ii) a personalized vision projection adapter tailored to each client. BLEND further introduces a novel loss function that blends the outputs of the global and personalized adapters to achieve personalization, while simultaneously promoting generalization through a principled anchor design implemented via the projection heads of the zero-shot VLM. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BLEND consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, highlighting its ability to effectively balance personalization and generalization across diverse system settings. (Code is available at: this https URL)

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2610.12907 [cs.CV]

(or arXiv:2610.12907v1 [cs.CV] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.12907 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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