CO-PFL: Contribution-Oriented Personalized Federated Learning for Heterogeneous Networks

Abstract: Personalized federated learning (PFL) addresses a critical challenge of collaboratively training customized models for clients with heterogeneous and scarce local data. Conventional federated learning, which relies on a single consensus model, proves inadequate under such data heterogeneity. Its standard aggregation method of weighting client updates heuristically or by data volume, operates under an equal-contribution assumption, failing to account for the actual utility and reliability of each client's update. This often results in suboptimal personalization and aggregation bias. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Contribution-Oriented PFL (CO-PFL), a novel algorithm that dynamically estimates each client's contribution for global aggregation. CO-PFL performs a joint assessment by analyzing both gradient direction discrepancies and prediction deviations, leveraging information from gradient and data subspaces. This dual-subspace analysis provides a principled and discriminative aggregation weight for each client, emphasizing high-quality updates. Furthermore, to bolster personalization adaptability and optimization stability, CO-PFL cohesively integrates a parameter-wise personalization mechanism with mask-aware momentum optimization. Our approach effectively mitigates aggregation bias, strengthens global coordination, and enhances local performance by facilitating the construction of tailored submodels with stable updates. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets (CIFAR10, CIFAR10C, CINIC10, and Mini-ImageNet) confirm that CO-PFL consistently surpasses state-of-the-art methods in in personalization accuracy, robustness, scalability and convergence stability.