# FedER: Federated Learning through Experience Replay and Privacy-Preserving Data Synthesis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.10048 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10048/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Jun 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.05629/) (2016)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [Advances and Open Problems in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04977/) (2019)
- [Federated Optimization in Heterogeneous Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.06127/) (2018)
- [Conditional Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1784/) (2014)
- [CheXpert: A Large Chest Radiograph Dataset with Uncertainty Labels and Expert Comparison](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07031/) (2019)
- [Training Generative Adversarial Networks with Limited Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06676/) (2020)
- [Experience Replay for Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11682/) (2018)
- [Deep Leakage from Gradients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08935/) (2019)
- [ChestX-ray8: Hospital-scale Chest X-ray Database and Benchmarks on Weakly-Supervised Classification and Localization of Common Thorax Diseases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02315/) (2017)
- [Dark Experience for General Continual Learning: a Strong, Simple Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07211/) (2020)
- [An Empirical Investigation of Catastrophic Forgetting in Gradient-Based Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6211/) (2013)
- [Inverting Gradients -- How easy is it to break privacy in federated learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.14053/) (2020)
- [FedBN: Federated Learning on Non-IID Features via Local Batch Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.07623/) (2021)
- [Federated Learning with Matched Averaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.06440/) (2020)
- [Can Decentralized Algorithms Outperform Centralized Algorithms? A Case Study for Decentralized Parallel Stochastic Gradient Descent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.09056/) (2017)
- [iDLG: Improved Deep Leakage from Gradients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.02610/) (2020)
- [Confounding variables can degrade generalization performance of radiological deep learning models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.00431/) (2018)
- [Differentially Private Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.06739/) (2018)
- [BCN20000: Dermoscopic Lesions in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02288/) (2019)
- [Privacy-preserving Federated Brain Tumour Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.00962/) (2019)
- [Overcoming Forgetting in Federated Learning on Non-IID Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.07796/) (2019)
- [BrainTorrent: A Peer-to-Peer Environment for Decentralized Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.06731/) (2019)
- [Decentralized Federated Averaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11375/) (2021)
- [COVID-19 Image Data Collection: Prospective Predictions Are the Future](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11988/) (2020)
- [Peer-to-peer Federated Learning on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.11173/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Federated Learning for Cyber Physical Systems: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.04873/) (2025)
- [Evidential Federated Learning for Skin Lesion Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10071/) (2024)
- [Decentralized Time Series Classification with ROCKET Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.17617/) (2025)
- [FeDMRA: Federated Incremental Learning with Dynamic Memory Replay Allocation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.28455/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In the medical field, multi-center collaborations are often sought to yield more generalizable findings by leveraging the heterogeneity of patient and clinical data. However, recent privacy regulations hinder the possibility to share data, and consequently, to come up with machine learning-based solutions that support diagnosis and prognosis. Federated learning (FL) aims at sidestepping this limitation by bringing AI-based solutions to data owners and only sharing local AI models, or parts thereof, that need then to be aggregated. However, most of the existing federated learning solutions are still at their infancy and show several shortcomings, from the lack of a reliable and effective aggregation scheme able to retain the knowledge learned locally to weak privacy preservation as real data may be reconstructed from model updates. Furthermore, the majority of these approaches, especially those dealing with medical data, relies on a centralized distributed learning strategy that poses robustness, scalability and trust issues. In this paper we present a federated and decentralized learning strategy, FedER, that, exploiting experience replay and generative adversarial concepts, effectively integrates features from local nodes, providing models able to generalize across multiple datasets while maintaining privacy. FedER is tested on two tasks -- tuberculosis and melanoma classification -- using multiple datasets in order to simulate realistic non-i.i.d. medical data scenarios. Results show that our approach achieves performance comparable to standard (non-federated) learning and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art federated methods in their centralized (thus, more favourable) formulation. Code is available at https://github.com/perceivelab/FedER