# Exploiting Personalized Invariance for Better Out-of-distribution Generalization in Federated Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.11243 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11243/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 45 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Nov 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.05629/) (2016)
- [Invariant Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02893/) (2019)
- [Distributionally Robust Neural Networks for Group Shifts: On the Importance of Regularization for Worst-Case Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08731/) (2019)
- [Challenging Common Assumptions in the Unsupervised Learning of Disentangled Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12359/) (2018)
- [Generalizing to Unseen Domains: A Survey on Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03097/) (2021)
- [Out-of-Distribution Generalization via Risk Extrapolation (REx)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00688/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Exploiting Shared Representations for Personalized Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.07078/) (2021)
- [An Efficient Framework for Clustered Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04088/) (2020)
- [Towards Personalized Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00710/) (2021)
- [Towards Out-Of-Distribution Generalization: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.13624/) (2021)
- [Adaptive Personalized Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13461/) (2020)
- [Three Approaches for Personalization with Applications to Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10619/) (2020)
- [Environment Inference for Invariant Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07249/) (2020)
- [The Non-IID Data Quagmire of Decentralized Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.00189/) (2019)
- [Personalized Cross-Silo Federated Learning on Non-IID Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.03797/) (2020)
- [Improving Federated Learning Personalization via Model Agnostic Meta Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12488/) (2019)
- [The Risks of Invariant Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05761/) (2020)
- [Communication-Efficient On-Device Machine Learning: Federated Distillation and Augmentation under Non-IID Private Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11479/) (2018)
- [Federated Learning of a Mixture of Global and Local Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05516/) (2020)
- [Personalized Federated Learning with First Order Model Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.08565/) (2020)
- [Invariant Risk Minimization Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.04692/) (2020)
- [Deep Stable Learning for Out-Of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07876/) (2021)
- [Federated Evaluation of On-device Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10252/) (2019)
- [Invariant Rationalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.09772/) (2020)
- [Lower Bounds and Optimal Algorithms for Personalized Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02372/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [FOOGD: Federated Collaboration for Both Out-of-distribution Generalization and Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11397/) (2024)
- [FOCoOp: Enhancing Out-of-Distribution Robustness in Federated Prompt Learning for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16218/) (2025)
- [Global Layers: Non-IID Tabular Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19290/) (2023)
- [Out-of-Distribution Federated Distillation with Domain-Aware Proxy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.08525/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recently, data heterogeneity among the training datasets on the local clients (a.k.a., Non-IID data) has attracted intense interest in Federated Learning (FL), and many personalized federated learning methods have been proposed to handle it. However, the distribution shift between the training dataset and testing dataset on each client is never considered in FL, despite it being general in real-world scenarios. We notice that the distribution shift (a.k.a., out-of-distribution generalization) problem under Non-IID federated setting becomes rather challenging due to the entanglement between personalized and spurious information. To tackle the above problem, we elaborate a general dual-regularized learning framework to explore the personalized invariance, compared with the exsiting personalized federated learning methods which are regularized by a single baseline (usually the global model). Utilizing the personalized invariant features, the developed personalized models can efficiently exploit the most relevant information and meanwhile eliminate spurious information so as to enhance the out-of-distribution generalization performance for each client. Both the theoretical analysis on convergence and OOD generalization performance and the results of extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method over the existing federated learning and invariant learning methods, in diverse out-of-distribution and Non-IID data cases.