Robust Personalized Federated Continual Learning via Explainable Multi-Granularity Prompt.

Abstract

Personalized Federated Continual Learning (PFCL) requires that the server not only effectively integrate temporal knowledge accumulated across past tasks and spatial knowledge distributed among heterogeneous clients, but also ensure strong personalized performance of the global model for each client. Existing methods, whether in Personalized Federated Learning (PFL) or Federated Continual Learning (FCL), have overlooked the multi-granularity representation of knowledge, which can be utilized to overcome Spatial-Temporal Catastrophic Forgetting (STCF) and enable coarse-to-fine personalization. Furthermore, most approaches rely on local client-side personalization, increasing computational load and failing to address the risks posed by malicious or low-quality clients. To this end, we propose FedMGP+, which utilizes multi-granularity prompts to address these challenges, namely coarse-grained global prompt and fine-grained local prompt. The former focuses on efficiently transferring shared global knowledge without spatial forgetting, and the latter emphasizes specific learning of personalized local knowledge to overcome temporal forgetting. Visualization results and theoretical analyses further reveal that coarse-grained prompts primarily guide regional attention, whereas fine-grained prompts enrich object-level representations within those regions. Building upon this, Personalized Selective Prompt Fusion is designed to exclusively fuse coarse-grained knowledge on the server to generate client-specific global prompts, reducing local overhead and resisting poisoning attacks from malicious clients. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed FedMGP+ effectively mitigates forgetting, significantly enhances personalized performance, and provides robust defense against poisoning and gradient leakage attacks.