# PFLlib: A Beginner-Friendly and Comprehensive Personalized Federated Learning Library and Benchmark

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.04992 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04992/

## Key facts

- Cited by 17 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 43 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [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)
- [Fashion-MNIST: a Novel Image Dataset for Benchmarking Machine Learning Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07747/) (2017)
- [Federated Optimization in Heterogeneous Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.06127/) (2018)
- [Character-level Convolutional Networks for Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.01626/) (2015)
- [WILDS: A Benchmark of in-the-Wild Distribution Shifts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07421/) (2020)
- [Deep Leakage from Gradients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08935/) (2019)
- [LEAF: A Benchmark for Federated Settings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01097/) (2018)
- [Model-Contrastive Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16257/) (2021)
- [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)
- [FedBN: Federated Learning on Non-IID Features via Local Batch Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.07623/) (2021)
- [Federated Learning on Non-IID Data Silos: An Experimental Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02079/) (2021)
- [Federated Learning Based on Dynamic Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.04263/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Towards Personalized Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00710/) (2021)
- [Flower: A Friendly Federated Learning Research Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.14390/) (2020)
- [Data-Free Knowledge Distillation for Heterogeneous Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.10056/) (2021)
- [A Downsampled Variant of ImageNet as an Alternative to the CIFAR datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.08819/) (2017)
- [Adaptive Personalized Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13461/) (2020)
- [FedProto: Federated Prototype Learning across Heterogeneous Clients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.00243/) (2021)
- [Think Locally, Act Globally: Federated Learning with Local and Global Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.01523/) (2020)
- [FedML: A Research Library and Benchmark for Federated Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.13518/) (2020)
- [Personalized Cross-Silo Federated Learning on Non-IID Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.03797/) (2020)
- [Personalized Federated Learning with First Order Model Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.08565/) (2020)
- [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 Label Distribution Skew via Logits Calibration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00189/) (2022)
- [Stochastic Controlled Averaging for Federated Learning with Communication Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08165/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [HtFLlib: A Comprehensive Heterogeneous Federated Learning Library and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03954/) (2025)
- [Enhancing Federated Domain Adaptation with Multi-Domain Prototype-Based Federated Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07738/) (2024)
- [A Comparative Study of Sampling Methods with Cross-Validation in the FedHome Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01950/) (2024)
- [Few-for-Many Personalized Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.11992/) (2026)
- [Improving Generalization in Heterogeneous Federated Continual Learning via Spatio-Temporal Gradient Matching with Prototypical Coreset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.12031/) (2025)
- [FedRE: A Representation Entanglement Framework for Model-Heterogeneous Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22265/) (2025)
- [Federated Learning in Offline and Online EMG Decoding: A Privacy and Performance Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.12652/) (2025)
- [A Scenario-Oriented Survey of Federated Recommender Systems: Techniques, Challenges, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.19620/) (2025)
- [FedL2T: Personalized Federated Learning with Two-Teacher Distillation for Seizure Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08984/) (2025)
- [Local Performance vs. Out-of-Distribution Generalization: An Empirical Analysis of Personalized Federated Learning in Heterogeneous Data Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.24503/) (2025)
- [SDFed: Bridging Local Global Discrepancy via Subspace Refinement and Divergence Control in Federated Prompt Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.08590/) (2026)
- [HiLoRA: Hierarchical Low-Rank Adaptation for Personalized Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.02785/) (2026)
- [Federated Distillation for Whole Slide Image via Gaussian-Mixture Feature Alignment and Curriculum Integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.00578/) (2026)
- [Silent Failures in Federated Personalization of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.00947/) (2026)
- [Collaborative Synthetic Data Generation for Knowledge Transfer in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.07565/) (2026)
- [FBID: Adaptive Personalized Federated Learning for Robust Out-of-Distribution Attack Detection in IoT Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.04073/) (2026)
- [FedLoRD: Personalized Federated Learning based on Low-Rank Structures of Model Parameter Differences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.17621/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Amid the ongoing advancements in Federated Learning (FL), a machine learning paradigm that allows collaborative learning with data privacy protection, personalized FL (pFL)has gained significant prominence as a research direction within the FL domain. Whereas traditional FL (tFL) focuses on jointly learning a global model, pFL aims to balance each client's global and personalized goals in FL settings. To foster the pFL research community, we started and built PFLlib, a comprehensive pFL library with an integrated benchmark platform. In PFLlib, we implemented 37 state-of-the-art FL algorithms (8 tFL algorithms and 29 pFL algorithms) and provided various evaluation environments with three statistically heterogeneous scenarios and 24 datasets. At present, PFLlib has gained more than 1600 stars and 300 forks on GitHub.