ORDERS: An Empirical Study of Norm-Rank Aggregation for Personalized Federated Learning

Personalized federated learning combines shared representations with client-specific predictors, but the contribution of a server weighting rule can be obscured by local training and evaluation choices. We study ORDERS, a configuration that combines a shared backbone, a private residual adapter and classifier, geometric weights assigned by descending update norm, feature alignment, and private-parameter perturbations. The server computes a weighted sum of updates obtained from the same broadcast model; it does not obtain an additional optimization effect from sequential addition. A fully specified evaluation comprises 80 final runs: eight configurations, two datasets, and five training seeds on one fixed partition per dataset. On two-class-per-client CIFAR-10, ORDERS achieves 80.51 ± 0.79% native mean client accuracy, compared with 79.02 ± 1.42% for FedPer-R1 and 80.27 ± 0.73% for the matched uniform-weight control. After common local fine-tuning, the difference from FedPer-R1 narrows to 0.32 percentage points. On Sent140, ORDERS reaches 74.71 ± 0.49%, only 0.69 points above a post hoc client training-majority diagnostic. Ablations provide limited, endpoint-dependent evidence for norm ranking and alignment, and no clear benefit from perturbations. Parameter-payload savings are 5.47% and 0.78%, respectively.