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Hauptverfasser: Guijt, Arthur, Thierens, Dirk, Kerkhof, Ellen, Wiersma, Jan, Alderliesten, Tanja, Bosman, Peter A. N.
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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Online-Zugang:https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17592
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author Guijt, Arthur
Thierens, Dirk
Kerkhof, Ellen
Wiersma, Jan
Alderliesten, Tanja
Bosman, Peter A. N.
author_facet Guijt, Arthur
Thierens, Dirk
Kerkhof, Ellen
Wiersma, Jan
Alderliesten, Tanja
Bosman, Peter A. N.
contents Deep learning has been shown to be very capable at performing many real-world tasks. However, this performance is often dependent on the presence of large and varied datasets. In some settings, like in the medical domain, data is often fragmented across parties, and cannot be readily shared. While federated learning addresses this situation, it is a solution that requires synchronicity of parties training a single model together, exchanging information about model weights. We investigate how asynchronous collaboration, where only already trained models are shared (e.g. as part of a publication), affects performance, and propose to use stitching as a method for combining models. Through taking a multi-objective perspective, where performance on each parties' data is viewed independently, we find that training solely on a single parties' data results in similar performance when merging with another parties' data, when considering performance on that single parties' data, while performance on other parties' data is notably worse. Moreover, while an ensemble of such individually trained networks generalizes better, performance on each parties' own dataset suffers. We find that combining intermediate representations in individually trained models with a well placed pair of stitching layers allows this performance to recover to a competitive degree while maintaining improved generalization, showing that asynchronous collaboration can yield competitive results.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_17592
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Sharing Knowledge without Sharing Data: Stitches can improve ensembles of disjointly trained models
Guijt, Arthur
Thierens, Dirk
Kerkhof, Ellen
Wiersma, Jan
Alderliesten, Tanja
Bosman, Peter A. N.
Machine Learning
Deep learning has been shown to be very capable at performing many real-world tasks. However, this performance is often dependent on the presence of large and varied datasets. In some settings, like in the medical domain, data is often fragmented across parties, and cannot be readily shared. While federated learning addresses this situation, it is a solution that requires synchronicity of parties training a single model together, exchanging information about model weights. We investigate how asynchronous collaboration, where only already trained models are shared (e.g. as part of a publication), affects performance, and propose to use stitching as a method for combining models. Through taking a multi-objective perspective, where performance on each parties' data is viewed independently, we find that training solely on a single parties' data results in similar performance when merging with another parties' data, when considering performance on that single parties' data, while performance on other parties' data is notably worse. Moreover, while an ensemble of such individually trained networks generalizes better, performance on each parties' own dataset suffers. We find that combining intermediate representations in individually trained models with a well placed pair of stitching layers allows this performance to recover to a competitive degree while maintaining improved generalization, showing that asynchronous collaboration can yield competitive results.
title Sharing Knowledge without Sharing Data: Stitches can improve ensembles of disjointly trained models
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17592