Those design questions also apply to unified multimodal models (UMMs), which support multiple modalities and tasks within a shared architecture. FedUMM, developed through a collaboration between William & Mary and NVIDIA, provides a concrete example by federating lightweight adapters over a frozen multimodal backbone.
FedUMM is supported by the NVIDIA Academic Grant Program, and received an Outstanding Student Paper Award at the FL@FM workshop at TheWebConf 2026.
