FedAPA: Server-side Gradient-Based Adaptive Personalized Aggregation for Federated Learning on Heterogeneous Data

Personalized federated learning (PFL) tailors models to clients' unique data distributions while preserving privacy. However, existing aggregation-weight-based PFL methods often struggle with heterogeneous data, facing challenges in accuracy, computational efficiency, and communication overhead. We propose FedAPA, a novel PFL method featuring a server-side, gradient-based adaptive aggregation strategy to generate personalized models, by updating aggregation weights based on gradients of client-parameter changes with respect to the aggregation weights in a centralized manner. FedAPA guarantees theoretical convergence and achieves superior accuracy and computational efficiency compared to 10 PFL competitors across three datasets, with competitive communication overhead.

@article{sun2025_2502.07456,
  title={ FedAPA: Server-side Gradient-Based Adaptive Personalized Aggregation for Federated Learning on Heterogeneous Data },
  author={ Yuxia Sun and Aoxiang Sun and Siyi Pan and Zhixiao Fu and Jingcai Guo },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.07456},
  year={ 2025 }
}