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Published as a conference paper at NeurIPS 2026

Bayes-pFCL:Bayesian Personalized Federated Continual Learning

qingyang yu, Yang Hua, Hao Wang, Yue Ning, Qizhen Zhang, Hao Wang

Abstract

Personalized federated continual learning (pFCL) alleviates catastrophic forgetting across tasks and data heterogeneity across clients. We view both challenges as interference between knowledge and propose Bayesian frameworks that define knowledge as posterior belief and quantify two types of interference: intra-model interference, measuring task-induced posterior drift, and inter-model interference, measuring aggregation-induced posterior drift. We show that such interference bounds catastrophic forgetting and data heterogeneity-induced loss, respectively. We then develop an interference-regularized local objective to guide personalization under catastrophic forgetting and data heterogeneity. The framework unifies standard FCL and pFL categories. Experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks demonstrate improved model performance over state-of-the-art pFCL methods.

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