# Federated style aware transformer aggregation of representations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.18841 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18841/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [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)
- [FiLM: Visual Reasoning with a General Conditioning Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.07871/) (2017)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [Searching for MobileNetV3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02244/) (2019)
- [Moment Matching for Multi-Source Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01754/) (2018)
- [In Search of Lost Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01434/) (2020)
- [Measuring the Effects of Non-Identical Data Distribution for Federated Visual Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.06335/) (2019)
- [Towards Federated Learning at Scale: System Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.01046/) (2019)
- [Model-Contrastive Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16257/) (2021)
- [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)
- [The Future of Digital Health with Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08119/) (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)
- [Clustered Federated Learning: Model-Agnostic Distributed Multi-Task Optimization under Privacy Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01991/) (2019)
- [Adaptive Personalized Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13461/) (2020)
- [Domain Separation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06019/) (2016)
- [Practical Secure Aggregation for Federated Learning on User-Held Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.04482/) (2016)
- [Survey of Personalization Techniques for Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08673/) (2020)
- [FedVision: An Online Visual Object Detection Platform Powered by Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06202/) (2020)
- [Differentially Private Secure Multi-Party Computation for Federated Learning in Financial Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05867/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Personalized Federated Learning (PFL) faces persistent challenges, including domain heterogeneity from diverse client data, data imbalance due to skewed participation, and strict communication constraints. Traditional federated learning often lacks personalization, as a single global model cannot capture client-specific characteristics, leading to biased predictions and poor generalization, especially for clients with highly divergent data distributions. To address these issues, we propose FedSTAR, a style-aware federated learning framework that disentangles client-specific style factors from shared content representations. FedSTAR aggregates class-wise prototypes using a Transformer-based attention mechanism, allowing the server to adaptively weight client contributions while preserving personalization. Furthermore, by exchanging compact prototypes and style vectors instead of full model parameters, FedSTAR significantly reduces communication overhead. Experimental results demonstrate that combining content-style disentanglement with attention-driven prototype aggregation improves personalization and robustness in heterogeneous environments without increasing communication cost.