# Exploiting Shared Representations for Personalized Federated Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.07078 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.07078/

## Key facts

- Cited by 541 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Feb 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.05629/) (2016)
- [Federated Optimization in Heterogeneous Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.06127/) (2018)
- [Adaptive Federated Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00295/) (2020)
- [Tackling the Objective Inconsistency Problem in Heterogeneous Federated Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07481/) (2020)
- [LEAF: A Benchmark for Federated Settings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01097/) (2018)
- [Federated Multi-Task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.10467/) (2017)
- [Ditto: Fair and Robust Federated Learning Through Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.04221/) (2020)
- [Personalized Federated Learning with Moreau Envelopes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.08848/) (2020)
- [Federated Learning with Personalization Layers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.00818/) (2019)
- [Rapid Learning or Feature Reuse? Towards Understanding the Effectiveness of MAML](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.09157/) (2019)
- [Adaptive Personalized Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13461/) (2020)
- [Think Locally, Act Globally: Federated Learning with Local and Global Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.01523/) (2020)
- [Three Approaches for Personalization with Applications to Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10619/) (2020)
- [Personalized Federated Learning: A Meta-Learning Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.07948/) (2020)
- [Improving Federated Learning Personalization via Model Agnostic Meta Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12488/) (2019)
- [Few-Shot Learning via Learning the Representation, Provably](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.09434/) (2020)
- [Federated Learning of a Mixture of Global and Local Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05516/) (2020)
- [The Benefit of Multitask Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.06279/) (2015)
- [On the Theory of Transfer Learning: The Importance of Task Diversity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11650/) (2020)
- [Adaptive Gradient-Based Meta-Learning Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02717/) (2019)
- [Provable Meta-Learning of Linear Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.11684/) (2020)
- [Nonconvex Optimization Meets Low-Rank Matrix Factorization: An Overview](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.09573/) (2018)
- [Federated Learning with Compression: Unified Analysis and Sharp Guarantees](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01154/) (2020)
- [Federated Meta-Learning with Fast Convergence and Efficient Communication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.07876/) (2018)
- [Federated Evaluation of On-device Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10252/) (2019)
- [Salvaging Federated Learning by Local Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.04758/) (2020)
- [FedSplit: An algorithmic framework for fast federated optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.05238/) (2020)
- [Low-rank Solutions of Linear Matrix Equations via Procrustes Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1507.03566/) (2015)
- [FedDANE: A Federated Newton-Type Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.01920/) (2020)
- [Straggler-Resilient Federated Learning: Leveraging the Interplay Between Statistical Accuracy and System Heterogeneity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.14453/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 541)

- [FedProto: Federated Prototype Learning across Heterogeneous Clients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.00243/) (2021)
- [FedBABU: Towards Enhanced Representation for Federated Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06042/) (2021)
- [Heterogeneous Federated Learning: State-of-the-art and Research Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10616/) (2023)
- [Federated Learning from Pre-Trained Models: A Contrastive Learning Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.10083/) (2022)
- [FedALA: Adaptive Local Aggregation for Personalized Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.01197/) (2022)
- [Federated Learning with Partial Model Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03809/) (2022)
- [Personalized Federated Learning with Feature Alignment and Classifier Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11867/) (2023)
- [Selective Aggregation for Low-Rank Adaptation in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.01463/) (2024)
- [DisPFL: Towards Communication-Efficient Personalized Federated Learning via Decentralized Sparse Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00187/) (2022)
- [Tackling Data Heterogeneity in Federated Learning with Class Prototypes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02758/) (2022)
- [Personalized Federated Learning through Local Memorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09360/) (2021)
- [FedAvg with Fine Tuning: Local Updates Lead to Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13692/) (2022)
- [FedGH: Heterogeneous Federated Learning with Generalized Global Header](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13137/) (2023)
- [No Fear of Classifier Biases: Neural Collapse Inspired Federated Learning with Synthetic and Fixed Classifier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10058/) (2023)
- [Dual-Personalizing Adapter for Federated Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19211/) (2024)
- [Efficient Model Personalization in Federated Learning via Client-Specific Prompt Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15367/) (2023)
- [FedTGP: Trainable Global Prototypes with Adaptive-Margin-Enhanced Contrastive Learning for Data and Model Heterogeneity in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03230/) (2024)
- [Global and Local Prompts Cooperation via Optimal Transport for Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00041/) (2024)
- [Federated Learning via Inexact ADMM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.10607/) (2022)
- [pFL-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Personalized Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.03655/) (2022)
- [pFedLoRA: Model-Heterogeneous Personalized Federated Learning with LoRA Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13283/) (2023)
- [Test-Time Robust Personalization for Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10920/) (2022)
- [Efficient Personalized Federated Learning via Sparse Model-Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02776/) (2023)
- [Eliminating Domain Bias for Federated Learning in Representation Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.14975/) (2023)
- [FedTP: Federated Learning by Transformer Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01572/) (2022)
- [FedCP: Separating Feature Information for Personalized Federated Learning via Conditional Policy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01217/) (2023)
- [Specificity-Preserving Federated Learning for MR Image Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05752/) (2021)
- [FedPop: A Bayesian Approach for Personalised Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.03611/) (2022)
- [Achieving Personalized Federated Learning with Sparse Local Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11380/) (2022)
- [On the Convergence of Clustered Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06187/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deep neural networks have shown the ability to extract universal feature representations from data such as images and text that have been useful for a variety of learning tasks. However, the fruits of representation learning have yet to be fully-realized in federated settings. Although data in federated settings is often non-i.i.d. across clients, the success of centralized deep learning suggests that data often shares a global feature representation, while the statistical heterogeneity across clients or tasks is concentrated in the labels. Based on this intuition, we propose a novel federated learning framework and algorithm for learning a shared data representation across clients and unique local heads for each client. Our algorithm harnesses the distributed computational power across clients to perform many local-updates with respect to the low-dimensional local parameters for every update of the representation. We prove that this method obtains linear convergence to the ground-truth representation with near-optimal sample complexity in a linear setting, demonstrating that it can efficiently reduce the problem dimension for each client. This result is of interest beyond federated learning to a broad class of problems in which we aim to learn a shared low-dimensional representation among data distributions, for example in meta-learning and multi-task learning. Further, extensive experimental results show the empirical improvement of our method over alternative personalized federated learning approaches in federated environments with heterogeneous data.