FedKPer: Tackling Generalization and Personalization in Medical Federated Learning via Knowledge Personalization

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Fowler, Zoe, AlRegib, Ghassan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Fowler, Zoe
AlRegib, Ghassan
author_facet Fowler, Zoe
AlRegib, Ghassan
contents Federated learning (FL) holds great potential for medical applications. However, statistical heterogeneity across healthcare institutions poses a major challenge for FL, as the global model struggles both to generalize across unseen patient populations and to adapt to the unique data distributions of individual hospitals. This heterogeneity also exacerbates forgetting at both the global and local level, resulting in previous learned patient patterns to be misclassified after model updates. While prior work has largely treated generalization and personalization as separate challenges, we show that a better balance between the two can be achieved through selective alignment with the global model and a modified aggregation scheme, which together mitigate the effects of statistical heterogeneity. Specifically, we introduce FedKPer, which introduces knowledge personalization into the training stage of each local device. Afterwards, generalization is considered via the global model aggregation process, where local updates that are reliable and label-diverse are emphasized. We evaluate the performance of FedKPer, devising additional metrics that relate to common consequences of forgetting. Overall, we demonstrate FedKPer improves the generalization-personalization trade-off without sacrificing retention.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_00698
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle FedKPer: Tackling Generalization and Personalization in Medical Federated Learning via Knowledge Personalization
Fowler, Zoe
AlRegib, Ghassan
Image and Video Processing
Machine Learning
Federated learning (FL) holds great potential for medical applications. However, statistical heterogeneity across healthcare institutions poses a major challenge for FL, as the global model struggles both to generalize across unseen patient populations and to adapt to the unique data distributions of individual hospitals. This heterogeneity also exacerbates forgetting at both the global and local level, resulting in previous learned patient patterns to be misclassified after model updates. While prior work has largely treated generalization and personalization as separate challenges, we show that a better balance between the two can be achieved through selective alignment with the global model and a modified aggregation scheme, which together mitigate the effects of statistical heterogeneity. Specifically, we introduce FedKPer, which introduces knowledge personalization into the training stage of each local device. Afterwards, generalization is considered via the global model aggregation process, where local updates that are reliable and label-diverse are emphasized. We evaluate the performance of FedKPer, devising additional metrics that relate to common consequences of forgetting. Overall, we demonstrate FedKPer improves the generalization-personalization trade-off without sacrificing retention.
title FedKPer: Tackling Generalization and Personalization in Medical Federated Learning via Knowledge Personalization
topic Image and Video Processing
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.00698