FedMerge: Federated Personalization via Model Merging

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Chen, Shutong, Zhou, Tianyi, Long, Guodong, Jiang, Jing, Zhang, Chengqi
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Chen, Shutong
Zhou, Tianyi
Long, Guodong
Jiang, Jing
Zhang, Chengqi
author_facet Chen, Shutong
Zhou, Tianyi
Long, Guodong
Jiang, Jing
Zhang, Chengqi
contents One global model in federated learning (FL) might not be sufficient to serve many clients with non-IID tasks and distributions. While there has been advances in FL to train multiple global models for better personalization, they only provide limited choices to clients so local finetuning is still indispensable. In this paper, we propose a novel ``FedMerge'' approach that can create a personalized model per client by simply merging multiple global models with automatically optimized and customized weights. In FedMerge, a few global models can serve many non-IID clients, even without further local finetuning. We formulate this problem as a joint optimization of global models and the merging weights for each client. Unlike existing FL approaches where the server broadcasts one or multiple global models to all clients, the server only needs to send a customized, merged model to each client. Moreover, instead of periodically interrupting the local training and re-initializing it to a global model, the merged model aligns better with each client's task and data distribution, smoothening the local-global gap between consecutive rounds caused by client drift. We evaluate FedMerge on three different non-IID settings applied to different domains with diverse tasks and data types, in which FedMerge consistently outperforms existing FL approaches, including clustering-based and mixture-of-experts (MoE) based methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_06768
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle FedMerge: Federated Personalization via Model Merging
Chen, Shutong
Zhou, Tianyi
Long, Guodong
Jiang, Jing
Zhang, Chengqi
Machine Learning
One global model in federated learning (FL) might not be sufficient to serve many clients with non-IID tasks and distributions. While there has been advances in FL to train multiple global models for better personalization, they only provide limited choices to clients so local finetuning is still indispensable. In this paper, we propose a novel ``FedMerge'' approach that can create a personalized model per client by simply merging multiple global models with automatically optimized and customized weights. In FedMerge, a few global models can serve many non-IID clients, even without further local finetuning. We formulate this problem as a joint optimization of global models and the merging weights for each client. Unlike existing FL approaches where the server broadcasts one or multiple global models to all clients, the server only needs to send a customized, merged model to each client. Moreover, instead of periodically interrupting the local training and re-initializing it to a global model, the merged model aligns better with each client's task and data distribution, smoothening the local-global gap between consecutive rounds caused by client drift. We evaluate FedMerge on three different non-IID settings applied to different domains with diverse tasks and data types, in which FedMerge consistently outperforms existing FL approaches, including clustering-based and mixture-of-experts (MoE) based methods.
title FedMerge: Federated Personalization via Model Merging
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.06768