# Convergence-Privacy-Fairness Trade-Off in Personalized Federated Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14251 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.14251/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Jun 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Deep Learning with Differential Privacy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.00133/) (2016)
- [Equality of Opportunity in Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02413/) (2016)
- [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 Differential Privacy: Algorithms and Performance Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00222/) (2019)
- [Towards Personalized Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00710/) (2021)
- [FedMD: Heterogenous Federated Learning via Model Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03581/) (2019)
- [Fair Resource Allocation in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10497/) (2019)
- [Personalized Cross-Silo Federated Learning on Non-IID Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.03797/) (2020)
- [Privacy and Robustness in Federated Learning: Attacks and Defenses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.06337/) (2020)
- [LDP-Fed: Federated Learning with Local Differential Privacy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03637/) (2020)
- [FedALA: Adaptive Local Aggregation for Personalized Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.01197/) (2022)
- [Local Differential Privacy based Federated Learning for Internet of Things](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.08856/) (2020)
- [Federated Learning Meets Multi-objective Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11489/) (2020)
- [Adapt to Adaptation: Learning Personalization for Cross-Silo Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08394/) (2021)
- [On Privacy and Personalization in Cross-Silo Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07902/) (2022)
- [Bandit-based Communication-Efficient Client Selection Strategies for Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.08009/) (2020)
- [Low-Latency Federated Learning over Wireless Channels with Differential Privacy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13039/) (2021)
- [Harnessing Wireless Channels for Scalable and Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01790/) (2020)
- [Amplitude-Varying Perturbation for Balancing Privacy and Utility in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04274/) (2023)
- [Semi-Synchronous Personalized Federated Learning over Mobile Edge Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13115/) (2022)
- [Multi-Carrier NOMA-Empowered Wireless Federated Learning with Optimal Power and Bandwidth Allocation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.06730/) (2023)
- [Differentially Private Over-the-Air Federated Learning Over MIMO Fading Channels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10982/) (2023)
- [Decentralized Federated Learning Over Imperfect Communication Channels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12894/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Personalized federated learning (PFL), e.g., the renowned Ditto, strikes a balance between personalization and generalization by conducting federated learning (FL) to guide personalized learning (PL). While FL is unaffected by personalized model training, in Ditto, PL depends on the outcome of the FL. However, the clients' concern about their privacy and consequent perturbation of their local models can affect the convergence and (performance) fairness of PL. This paper presents PFL, called DP-Ditto, which is a non-trivial extension of Ditto under the protection of differential privacy (DP), and analyzes the trade-off among its privacy guarantee, model convergence, and performance distribution fairness. We also analyze the convergence upper bound of the personalized models under DP-Ditto and derive the optimal number of global aggregations given a privacy budget. Further, we analyze the performance fairness of the personalized models, and reveal the feasibility of optimizing DP-Ditto jointly for convergence and fairness. Experiments validate our analysis and demonstrate that DP-Ditto can surpass the DP-perturbed versions of the state-of-the-art PFL models, such as FedAMP, pFedMe, APPLE, and FedALA, by over 32.71% in fairness and 9.66% in accuracy.