Hypernetworks for Model-Heterogeneous Personalized Federated Learning
This addresses the problem of scalable and private personalized federated learning for clients with heterogeneous models, though it is incremental as it builds on existing hypernetwork methods.
The paper tackles model heterogeneity in personalized federated learning by proposing a hypernetwork-based framework that generates personalized parameters without external data or model architecture disclosure, achieving competitive accuracy and strong generalization in experiments.
Recent advances in personalized federated learning have focused on addressing client model heterogeneity. However, most existing methods still require external data, rely on model decoupling, or adopt partial learning strategies, which can limit their practicality and scalability. In this paper, we revisit hypernetwork-based methods and leverage their strong generalization capabilities to design a simple yet effective framework for heterogeneous personalized federated learning. Specifically, we propose MH-pFedHN, which leverages a server-side hypernetwork that takes client-specific embedding vectors as input and outputs personalized parameters tailored to each client's heterogeneous model. To promote knowledge sharing and reduce computation, we introduce a multi-head structure within the hypernetwork, allowing clients with similar model sizes to share heads. Furthermore, we further propose MH-pFedHNGD, which integrates an optional lightweight global model to improve generalization. Our framework does not rely on external datasets and does not require disclosure of client model architectures, thereby offering enhanced privacy and flexibility. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks and model settings demonstrate that our approach achieves competitive accuracy, strong generalization, and serves as a robust baseline for future research in model-heterogeneous personalized federated learning.