FedRef: Bayesian Fine-Tuning using a Reference Model to Mitigate Catastrophic Forgetting for Heterogeneous Federated Learning

arXiv:2506.23210v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative model training across distributed clients while preserving data privacy. However, data and system heterogeneity often cause catastrophic forgetting and unbounded drift in model updates, leading to degraded predictive performance and increased client-side computation. To address these challenges, we propose FedRef, a Bayesian fine-tuning method that leverages a reference model constructed from