Abstract
Federated vision-language models (FedVLMs) represent one of the emerging frontiers of machine learning, aiming to integrate federated learning within the fine-tuning pipelines of vision-language models (VLMs). In this work, we introduce BLEND, a new framework designed to jointly enhance the personalization and generalization capabilities of FedVLMs. BLEND proposes a selective VLM parameter fine-tuning and aggregation strategy that consists of (i) global vision and text adapters shared across clients, and (ii) a personalized vision projection adapter tailored to each client. BLEND further introduces a novel loss function that blends the outputs of the global and personalized adapters to achieve personalization, while simultaneously promoting generalization through a principled anchor design implemented via the projection heads of the zero-shot VLM. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BLEND consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, highlighting its ability to effectively balance personalization and generalization across diverse system settings. (Code is available at: this https URL)
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12907
