Personalized Retrogress-Resilient Framework for Real-World Medical Federated Learning

Abstract

Nowadays, deep learning methods with large-scale datasets can produce clinically useful models for computer-aided diagnosis. However, the privacy and ethical concerns are increasingly critical, which make it difficult to collect large quantities of data from multiple institutions. Federated Learning (FL) provides a promising decentralized solution to train model collaboratively by exchanging client models instead of private data. However, the server aggregation of existing FL methods is observed to degrade the model performance in real-world medical FL setting, which is termed as retrogress. To address this problem, we propose a personalized retrogress-resilient framework to produce a superior personalized model for each client. Specifically, we devise a Progressive Fourier Aggregation (PFA) at the server to achieve more stable and effective global knowledge gathering by integrating client models from low-frequency to high-frequency gradually. Moreover, with an introduced deputy model to receive the aggregated server model, we design a Deputy-Enhanced Transfer (DET) strategy at the client and conduct three steps of Recover-Exchange-Sublimate to ameliorate the personalized local model by transferring the global knowledge smoothly. Extensive experiments on real-world dermoscopic FL dataset prove that our personalized retrogress-resilient framework outperforms state-of-the-art FL methods, as well as the generalization on an out-of-distribution cohort. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/CityU-AIM-Group/PRR-FL.