0383-Paper6676@2026@MICCAI

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#1 FedSwitch: From Standard to Balanced Aggregation via Private Histogram Estimation in Federated Medical Image Classification [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi] [REL]

Authors: Cacace Paolo, Taiello Riccardo, Protani Andrea, Molina Van den Bosch Marc, Santos Diogo Reis, Brutti Pierpaolo, Serio Luigi, Cacace Paolo, Taiello Riccardo, Protani Andrea, Molina Van den Bosch Marc, Santos Diogo Reis, Brutti Pierpaolo, Serio Luigi

Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative model training across institutions without sharing raw data. Performance degrades, however, when label distributions are imbalanced across sites, a common scenario in medical settings where disease prevalence could vary drastically across institutions. Existing distribution-aware methods rely on label distribution statistics that clients cannot share in real-world federated settings due to privacy and regulatory constraints. We propose FedSwitch, a model-agnostic FL framework that estimates the global label histogram, under client-level epsilon-differential privacy, and uses the estimate to switch from FedAvg to distribution-aware aggregation. Each client adds partial discrete Laplace noise to its bounded label counts and secret-shares the result via Shamir’s scheme, designated decryptors reconstruct the noisy aggregate without ever observing individual contributions. The optimal switching round can be estimated via a closed-form variance decomposition that accounts for bounded contributions, client sampling, and differential-privacy noise components. We evaluate FedSwitch on medical imaging benchmarks under realistic heterogeneous settings, demonstrating consistent improvements over standard FL aggregation with negligible communication overhead.

Subject: MICCAI.2026