Skip to content

scatter_plot Phalanx

Federated learning on the latest Flower, with OpenTelemetry-native observability

hub flwr 1.31 Message API | tune federated LoRA | monitoring OTel traces + metrics

What is Phalanx?

Phalanx is a federated-learning research testbed that rides the latest Flower release: the flwr Message API, flwr-datasets, HuggingFace Transformers, and PEFT/LoRA. Its distinguishing feature is OpenTelemetry-native observability — the server emits a span and FL metrics for every round, and each client emits a span for its local train/evaluate pass, so a federated run is visible in any OTLP backend (Jaeger, Grafana Tempo, an OpenTelemetry Collector).

The default showcase is a federated LoRA fine-tune of a tiny BERT on IMDB sentiment, partitioned non-IID with a Dirichlet partitioner. Only the LoRA adapters and the classification head are federated; the frozen backbone stays on each client.

Explore