Federated Ensemble Learning with Progressive Model Personalization

Abstract

Federated Learning provides a privacy-preserving paradigm for distributed learning, but suffers from statistical heterogeneity across clients. Personalized Federated Learning (PFL) mitigates this issue by considering client-specific models. A widely adopted approach in PFL decomposes neural networks into a shared feature extractor and client-specific heads. While effective, this design induces a fundamental tradeoff: deep or expressive shared components hinder personalization, whereas large local heads exacerbate overfitting under limited per-client data. Most existing methods rely on rigid, shallow heads, and therefore fail to navigate this tradeoff in a principled manner. In this work, we propose a boosting-inspired framework that enables a smooth control of this tradeoff. Instead of training a single personalized model, we construct an ensemble of $T$ models for each client. Across boosting iterations, the depth of the personalized component are progressively increased, while its effective complexity is systematically controlled via low-rank factorization or width shrinkage. This design simultaneously limits overfitting and substantially reduces per-client bias by allowing increasingly expressive personalization. We provide theoretical analysis that establishes generalization bounds with favorable dependence on the average local sample size and the total number of clients. Specifically, we prove that the complexity of the shared layers is effectively suppressed, while the dependence on the boosting horizon $T$ is controlled through parameter reduction. Notably, we provide a novel nonlinear generalization guarantee for decoupled PFL models. Extensive experiments on benchmark and real-world datasets (e.g., EMNIST, CIFAR-10/100, and Sent140) demonstrate that the proposed framework consistently outperforms state-of-the-art PFL methods under heterogeneous data distributions.