On Performance Guarantees for Federated Learning with Personalized Constraints

arXiv cs.LG / 3/23/2026

📰 NewsModels & Research

Key Points

  • The paper introduces PC-FedAvg for personalized constrained federated optimization, where each agent has a convex local objective and a private constraint set, enabling customization without sharing constraint information.
  • It uses a cross-estimate mechanism so agents update all blocks locally and only penalize infeasibility in their own block, avoiding global consensus on constraints.
  • The authors derive communication-complexity rates of O(ε^{-2}) for suboptimality and O(ε^{-1}) for agent-wise infeasibility, with preliminary experiments on MNIST and CIFAR-10 validating the theory.
  • The work addresses heterogeneous resource and model constraints in federated learning, contributing to more practical and privacy-preserving personalized FL solutions.

Abstract

Federated learning (FL) has emerged as a communication-efficient algorithmic framework for distributed learning across multiple agents. While standard FL formulations capture unconstrained or globally constrained problems, many practical settings involve heterogeneous resource or model constraints, leading to optimization problems with agent-specific feasible sets. Here, we study a personalized constrained federated optimization problem in which each agent is associated with a convex local objective and a private constraint set. We propose PC-FedAvg, a method in which each agent maintains cross-estimates of the other agents' variables through a multi-block local decision vector. Each agent updates all blocks locally, penalizing infeasibility only in its own block. Moreover, the cross-estimate mechanism enables personalization without requiring consensus or sharing constraint information among agents. We establish communication-complexity rates of \mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-2}) for suboptimality and \mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-1}) for agent-wise infeasibility. Preliminary experiments on the MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets validate our theoretical findings.