PID-Guided Partial Alignment for Multimodal Decentralized Federated Learning

Abstract

Multimodal decentralized federated learning (DFL) must support collaboration among agents that hold different modality subsets and often different model components, while operating over peer-to-peer (P2P) overlays without a coordinating server or a global network view. A key obstacle is that conventional multimodal training often relies on a single shared representation, which implicitly assumes that heterogeneous peers can exchange and aggregate the same model components over the same communication links. In multimodal DFL, this assumption breaks down: uni- and multimodal agents may push incompatible updates through shared overlays, weakening both inter-agent transfer and cross-modal interaction. We present PARSE, a server-free framework that brings partial information decomposition (PID) into multimodal DFL. Each agent splits its latent features into redundant, unique, and synergistic slices ("feature fission"), and performs slice-aware communication over modality-conditioned P2P overlays. During training, agents exchange only the slices that are semantically alignable with their neighbors, according to the modalities and model components they share ("partial alignment"). This design avoids centralized orchestration and gradient-surgery style conflict handling, while remaining compatible with standard DFL constraints and a range of P2P overlay topologies. Across multiple benchmarks and heterogeneous peer mixes, PARSE consistently outperforms task-, modality-, and hybrid-sharing multimodal DFL baselines while keeping per-link payloads bounded. Ablations on fusion choices and split ratios, together with qualitative feature analyses and overlay-topology studies, demonstrate the robustness and communication efficiency of the proposed slice-aware design.