Adaptive Hyper-graph Aggregation for Modality-Agnostic Federated Learning

Fan Qi, Shuai Li; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 12312-12321

In Federated Learning (FL) the issue of statistical data heterogeneity has been a significant challenge to the field's ongoing development. This problem is further exacerbated when clients' data vary in modalities. In response to these issues of statistical heterogeneity and modality incompatibility we propose the Adaptive Hyper-graph Aggregation framework a novel solution for Modality-Agnostic Federated Learning. We design a Modular Architecture for Local Model with single modality setting the stage for efficient intra-modality sharing and inter-modality complementarity. An innovative Global Consensus Prototype Enhancer is crafted to assimilate and broadcast global consensus knowledge within the network. At the core of our approach lies the Adaptive Hyper-graph Learning Strategy which effectively tackles the inherent challenges of modality incompatibility and statistical heterogeneity within federated learning environments accomplishing this adaptively even without the server being aware of the clients' modalities. Our approach tested on three multimodal benchmark datasets demonstrated strong performance across diverse data distributions affirming its effectiveness in multimodal federated learning.