Shamsiiat Abdurakhmanova

Shamsiiat Abdurakhmanova, Amirhossein Mohammadi, Yasmin SarcheshmehPour et al.

Many important machine learning applications involve networks of devices-such as wearables or smartphones-that generate local data and train personalized models. A key challenge is determining which peers are most beneficial for collaboration. We propose a simple and privacy-preserving method to select relevant collaborators by evaluating how much a model improves after a single gradient step using another devices data-without sharing raw data. This method naturally extends to non-parametric models by replacing the gradient step with a non-parametric generalization. Our approach enables model-agnostic, data-driven peer selection for personalized federated learning (PersFL).

Shamsiiat Abdurakhmanova, Alex Jung

We present a graph-regularized learning of Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs) in distributed settings with heterogeneous and limited local data. The method exploits a provided similarity graph to guide parameter sharing among nodes, avoiding the transfer of raw data. The resulting model allows for flexible aggregation of neighbors' parameters and outperforms both centralized and locally trained GMMs in heterogeneous, low-sample regimes.