Dual prompt personalized federated learning in foundation models

Personalized federated learning (PFL) has garnered significant attention for its ability to address heterogeneous client data distributions while preserving data privacy. However, when local client data is limited, deep learning models often suffer from insufficient training, leading to suboptimal performance. Foundation models, such as CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining), exhibit strong feature extraction capabilities and can alleviate this issue by fine-tuning on limited local data. Despite their potential, foundation models are rarely utilized in federated learning scenarios, and challenges related to integrating new clients remain largely unresolved. To address these challenges, we propose the Dual Prompt Personalized Federated Learning (DP 2 FL) framework, which introduces dual prompts and an adaptive aggregation strategy. DP 2 FL combines global task awareness with local data-driven insights, enabling local models to achieve effective generalization while remaining adaptable to specific data distributions. Moreover, DP 2 FL introduces a global model that enables prediction on new data sources and seamlessly integrates newly added clients without requiring retraining. Experimental results in highly heterogeneous environments validate the effectiveness of DP 2 FL’s prompt design and aggregation strategy, underscoring the advantages of prediction on novel data sources and demonstrating the seamless integration of new clients into the federated learning framework.