OvA-LP: A Simple and Efficient Framework for Federated Learning on Non-IID Data

Abstract

Federated fine-tuning (FFT) adapts foundation models to decentralized data but remains fragile under heterogeneous client distributions due to local drift, i.e., client-level update divergences that induce systematic bias and amplified variance in the global model. Existing aggregation and personalization methods largely correct drift post hoc, which proves brittle under extreme non-IID conditions. We introduce OvA-LP, a minimalist framework that is, to our knowledge, the first explicitly designed to suppress drift at its source within the PEFT-based FFT paradigm. OvA-LP combines linear probing on a frozen encoder with a one-vs-all head and a simple two-stage procedure, preserving pretrained feature geometry and decoupling logits to prevent the mechanisms that amplify drift. On CIFAR-100 with 100 clients, averaged over shard-1, shard-2, and Bernoulli-Dirichlet partitions, OvA-LP retains 95.9% of its IID accuracy, whereas state-of-the-art FFT baselines retain only 10.1% (PFPT) and 34.5% (FFT-MoE) under the same conditions. OvA-LP further maintains resilience under both symmetric and asymmetric label noise. In addition, precomputing encoder features makes per-round cost nearly independent of encoder size. Together, these results demonstrate that OvA-LP provides a principled and efficient basis for robust FFT under heterogeneity.