When Is Personalized Federated Learning Worth Its Deployment Cost?

Abstract

Personalized federated learning (PFL) may improve client-level performance, but deeper personalization increases deployment cost. We formulate personalization-depth selection as a utility-based empirical decision problem in which client utility equals Macro-F1 minus a cost-sensitivity weight times deployment cost, over six personalization depths labeled P0 through P5. We compare fixed policies with an offline per-client Oracle reference and report allocation maps over Dirichlet data heterogeneity and cost sensitivity. Although evaluated on this hierarchy, the formulation can accommodate any finite candidate set. On CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and a PTB-XL subset, personalization shows empirical, setting-dependent decision regimes rather than a universal benefit: higher cost sensitivity shifts Oracle mass toward the global-only depth P0; low cost sensitivity can favor deeper actions. Patterns are grid observations (three seeds per cell), not theoretical boundaries. Best-uniform is competitive with Oracle assignment (6.5 percent plus or minus 7.8 percent relative regret; 95 percent confidence interval 5.9 to 7.1), whereas random and personalize-all incur much larger regret (189.3 percent plus or minus 367.1 percent and 409.0 percent plus or minus 803.2 percent). Under the same utility, Ditto full-model personalization is substantially suboptimal once cost is counted. The contribution is an offline characterization of when personalization depth is worth its cost, not a new PFL optimizer or deployment-time scheduler.