Federated Oriented Learning: A Practical One-Shot Personalized Federated Learning Framework

Guan Huang, Tao Shu
Proceedings of the 42nd International Conference on Machine Learning, PMLR 267:25762-25790, 2025.

Abstract

Personalized Federated Learning (PFL) has become a promising learning paradigm, enabling the training of high-quality personalized models through multiple communication rounds between clients and a central server. However, directly applying traditional PFL in real-world environments where communication is expensive, limited, or infeasible is challenging, as seen in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite constellations, which face severe communication constraints due to their high mobility, limited contact windows. To address these issues, we introduce Federated Oriented Learning (FOL), a novel four-stage one-shot PFL algorithm designed to enhance local model performance by leveraging neighboring models within stringent communication constraints. FOL comprises model pretraining, model collection, model alignment (via fine-tuning, pruning, post fine-tuning, and ensemble refinement), and knowledge distillation stages. We establish two theoretical guarantees on empirical risk discrepancy between student and teacher models and the convergence of the distillation process. Extensive experiments on datasets Wildfire, Hurricane, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and SVHN demonstrate that FOL consistently outperforms state-of-the-art one-shot Federated Learning (OFL) methods; for example, it achieves accuracy improvements of up to 39.24% over the baselines on the Wildfire dataset.

Cite this Paper

BibTeX
@InProceedings{pmlr-v267-huang25ae, title = {Federated Oriented Learning: A Practical One-Shot Personalized Federated Learning Framework}, author = {Huang, Guan and Shu, Tao}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 42nd International Conference on Machine Learning}, pages = {25762--25790}, year = {2025}, editor = {Singh, Aarti and Fazel, Maryam and Hsu, Daniel and Lacoste-Julien, Simon and Berkenkamp, Felix and Maharaj, Tegan and Wagstaff, Kiri and Zhu, Jerry}, volume = {267}, series = {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research}, month = {13--19 Jul}, publisher = {PMLR}, pdf = {https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mlresearch/v267/main/assets/huang25ae/huang25ae.pdf}, url = {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v267/huang25ae.html}, abstract = {Personalized Federated Learning (PFL) has become a promising learning paradigm, enabling the training of high-quality personalized models through multiple communication rounds between clients and a central server. However, directly applying traditional PFL in real-world environments where communication is expensive, limited, or infeasible is challenging, as seen in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite constellations, which face severe communication constraints due to their high mobility, limited contact windows. To address these issues, we introduce Federated Oriented Learning (FOL), a novel four-stage one-shot PFL algorithm designed to enhance local model performance by leveraging neighboring models within stringent communication constraints. FOL comprises model pretraining, model collection, model alignment (via fine-tuning, pruning, post fine-tuning, and ensemble refinement), and knowledge distillation stages. We establish two theoretical guarantees on empirical risk discrepancy between student and teacher models and the convergence of the distillation process. Extensive experiments on datasets Wildfire, Hurricane, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and SVHN demonstrate that FOL consistently outperforms state-of-the-art one-shot Federated Learning (OFL) methods; for example, it achieves accuracy improvements of up to 39.24% over the baselines on the Wildfire dataset.} }
Endnote
%0 Conference Paper %T Federated Oriented Learning: A Practical One-Shot Personalized Federated Learning Framework %A Guan Huang %A Tao Shu %B Proceedings of the 42nd International Conference on Machine Learning %C Proceedings of Machine Learning Research %D 2025 %E Aarti Singh %E Maryam Fazel %E Daniel Hsu %E Simon Lacoste-Julien %E Felix Berkenkamp %E Tegan Maharaj %E Kiri Wagstaff %E Jerry Zhu %F pmlr-v267-huang25ae %I PMLR %P 25762--25790 %U https://proceedings.mlr.press/v267/huang25ae.html %V 267 %X Personalized Federated Learning (PFL) has become a promising learning paradigm, enabling the training of high-quality personalized models through multiple communication rounds between clients and a central server. However, directly applying traditional PFL in real-world environments where communication is expensive, limited, or infeasible is challenging, as seen in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite constellations, which face severe communication constraints due to their high mobility, limited contact windows. To address these issues, we introduce Federated Oriented Learning (FOL), a novel four-stage one-shot PFL algorithm designed to enhance local model performance by leveraging neighboring models within stringent communication constraints. FOL comprises model pretraining, model collection, model alignment (via fine-tuning, pruning, post fine-tuning, and ensemble refinement), and knowledge distillation stages. We establish two theoretical guarantees on empirical risk discrepancy between student and teacher models and the convergence of the distillation process. Extensive experiments on datasets Wildfire, Hurricane, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and SVHN demonstrate that FOL consistently outperforms state-of-the-art one-shot Federated Learning (OFL) methods; for example, it achieves accuracy improvements of up to 39.24% over the baselines on the Wildfire dataset.
APA
Huang, G. & Shu, T.. (2025). Federated Oriented Learning: A Practical One-Shot Personalized Federated Learning Framework. Proceedings of the 42nd International Conference on Machine Learning, in Proceedings of Machine Learning Research 267:25762-25790 Available from https://proceedings.mlr.press/v267/huang25ae.html.

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