# Parameter-Efficient and Personalized Federated Training of Generative Models at the Edge

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.11585 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.11585/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Robustness, privacy and adversarial aspects, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 33 of its 66 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Oct 2025.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Robustness, privacy and adversarial aspects](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/robustness-privacy-and-adversarial-aspects/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.05629/) (2016)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00190/) (2021)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [Federated Optimization in Heterogeneous Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.06127/) (2018)
- [Deep Leakage from Gradients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08935/) (2019)
- [Tackling the Objective Inconsistency Problem in Heterogeneous Federated Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07481/) (2020)
- [How To Backdoor Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.00459/) (2018)
- [Ensemble Distillation for Robust Model Fusion in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07242/) (2020)
- [Ditto: Fair and Robust Federated Learning Through Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.04221/) (2020)
- [Federated Learning with Personalization Layers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.00818/) (2019)
- [Towards Personalized Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00710/) (2021)
- [Agnostic Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00146/) (2019)
- [Flower: A Friendly Federated Learning Research Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.14390/) (2020)
- [Split learning for health: Distributed deep learning without sharing raw patient data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00564/) (2018)
- [Data-Free Knowledge Distillation for Heterogeneous Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.10056/) (2021)
- [SnapFusion: Text-to-Image Diffusion Model on Mobile Devices within Two Seconds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00980/) (2023)
- [Federated Meta-Learning with Fast Convergence and Efficient Communication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.07876/) (2018)
- [Federated Learning for Wireless Communications: Motivation, Opportunities and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06847/) (2019)
- [Federated Unlearning via Class-Discriminative Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.11794/) (2021)
- [Federated Unsupervised Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.08982/) (2020)
- [FedPrompt: Communication-Efficient and Privacy Preserving Prompt Tuning in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12268/) (2022)
- [A General Approach to Adding Differential Privacy to Iterative Training Procedures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.06210/) (2018)
- [Learning from Heterogeneity: Generalizing Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition via Distributionally Robust Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15765/) (2025)
- [WiOpen: A Robust Wi-Fi-based Open-set Gesture Recognition Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00822/) (2024)
- [ReSup: Reliable Label Noise Suppression for Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17895/) (2023)
- [Unified Static and Dynamic Network: Efficient Temporal Filtering for Video Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14174/) (2024)
- [FedQuad: Adaptive Layer-wise LoRA Deployment and Activation Quantization for Federated Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01001/) (2025)
- [Accelerating Mixture-of-Expert Inference with Adaptive Expert Split Mechanism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.08342/) (2025)
- [FedFormer: Contextual Federation with Attention in Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13697/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large generative models (for example, language and diffusion models) enable high-quality text and image synthesis but are hard to train or adapt in cross-device federated settings due to heavy computation and communication and statistical/system heterogeneity. We propose FedGen-Edge, a framework that decouples a frozen, pre-trained global backbone from lightweight client-side adapters and federates only the adapters. Using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) constrains client updates to a compact subspace, which reduces uplink traffic by more than 99 percent versus full-model FedAvg, stabilizes aggregation under non-IID data, and naturally supports personalization because each client can keep a locally tuned adapter. On language modeling (PTB) and image generation (CIFAR-10), FedGen-Edge achieves lower perplexity/FID and faster convergence than strong baselines while retaining a simple FedAvg-style server. A brief ablation shows diminishing returns beyond moderate LoRA rank and a trade-off between local epochs and client drift. FedGen-Edge offers a practical path toward privacy-preserving, resource-aware, and personalized generative AI on heterogeneous edge devices.