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

arXiv:2610.10361v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Personalized federated learning combines shared representations with client-specific predictors, but the contribution of a server weighting rule can be obscured by local training and evaluation choices. We study ORDERS, a configuration that combines a shared backbone, a private residual adapter and classifier, geometric weights assigned by descending update norm, feature alignment, and private-parameter perturbations. The server computes a weighted sum of updates obtained from the same broadcast model; it does not obtain an additional optimization effect from sequential addition. A fully specified evaluation comprises 80 final runs: eight configurations, two datasets, and five training seeds on one fixed partition per dataset. On two-class-per-client CIFAR-10, ORDERS achieves $80.51 \pm 0.79\%$ native mean client accuracy, compared with $79.02 \pm 1.42\%$ for FedPer-R1 and $80.27 \pm 0.73\%$ for the matched uniform-weight control. After common local fine-tuning, the difference from FedPer-R1 narrows to 0.32 percentage points. On Sent140, ORDERS reaches $74.71 \pm 0.49\%$, only 0.69 points above a post hoc client training-majority diagnostic. Ablations provide limited, endpoint-dependent evidence for norm ranking and alignment, and no clear benefit from perturbations. Parameter-payload savings are 5.47% and 0.78%, respectively.

Abstract:Personalized federated learning combines shared representations with client-specific predictors, but the contribution of a server weighting rule can be obscured by local training and evaluation choices. We study ORDERS, a configuration that combines a shared backbone, a private residual adapter and classifier, geometric weights assigned by descending update norm, feature alignment, and private-parameter perturbations. The server computes a weighted sum of updates obtained from the same broadcast model; it does not obtain an additional optimization effect from sequential addition. A fully specified evaluation comprises 80 final runs: eight configurations, two datasets, and five training seeds on one fixed partition per dataset. On two-class-per-client CIFAR-10, ORDERS achieves $80.51 \pm 0.79\%$ native mean client accuracy, compared with $79.02 \pm 1.42\%$ for FedPer-R1 and $80.27 \pm 0.73\%$ for the matched uniform-weight control. After common local fine-tuning, the difference from FedPer-R1 narrows to 0.32 percentage points. On Sent140, ORDERS reaches $74.71 \pm 0.49\%$, only 0.69 points above a post hoc client training-majority diagnostic. Ablations provide limited, endpoint-dependent evidence for norm ranking and alignment, and no clear benefit from perturbations. Parameter-payload savings are 5.47% and 0.78%, respectively.

Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2610.10361 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2610.10361v1 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.10361 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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

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