# Collaborative Chinese Text Recognition with Personalized Federated Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.05602 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05602/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.05629/) (2016)
- [Federated Optimization in Heterogeneous Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.06127/) (2018)
- [Ensemble Distillation for Robust Model Fusion in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07242/) (2020)
- [Federated Multi-Task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.10467/) (2017)
- [Ditto: Fair and Robust Federated Learning Through Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.04221/) (2020)
- [Personalized Federated Learning with Moreau Envelopes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.08848/) (2020)
- [ECA-Net: Efficient Channel Attention for Deep Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03151/) (2019)
- [FedBN: Federated Learning on Non-IID Features via Local Batch Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.07623/) (2021)
- [Federated Learning with Personalization Layers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.00818/) (2019)
- [Exploiting Shared Representations for Personalized Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.07078/) (2021)
- [An End-to-End Trainable Neural Network for Image-based Sequence Recognition and Its Application to Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1507.05717/) (2015)
- [Dreaming to Distill: Data-free Knowledge Transfer via DeepInversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08795/) (2019)
- [See through Gradients: Image Batch Recovery via GradInversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07586/) (2021)
- [Think Locally, Act Globally: Federated Learning with Local and Global Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.01523/) (2020)
- [Personalized Cross-Silo Federated Learning on Non-IID Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.03797/) (2020)
- [TrOCR: Transformer-based Optical Character Recognition with Pre-trained Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.10282/) (2021)
- [Personalized Federated Learning with First Order Model Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.08565/) (2020)
- [Read Like Humans: Autonomous, Bidirectional and Iterative Language Modeling for Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06495/) (2021)
- [Towards Accurate Scene Text Recognition with Semantic Reasoning Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12294/) (2020)
- [FedALA: Adaptive Local Aggregation for Personalized Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.01197/) (2022)
- [SEED: Semantics Enhanced Encoder-Decoder Framework for Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10977/) (2020)
- [From Two to One: A New Scene Text Recognizer with Visual Language Modeling Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09661/) (2021)
- [Benchmarking Chinese Text Recognition: Datasets, Baselines, and an Empirical Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.15093/) (2021)
- [Primitive Representation Learning for Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04286/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In Chinese text recognition, to compensate for the insufficient local data and improve the performance of local few-shot character recognition, it is often necessary for one organization to collect a large amount of data from similar organizations. However, due to the natural presence of private information in text data, such as addresses and phone numbers, different organizations are unwilling to share private data. Therefore, it becomes increasingly important to design a privacy-preserving collaborative training framework for the Chinese text recognition task. In this paper, we introduce personalized federated learning (pFL) into the Chinese text recognition task and propose the pFedCR algorithm, which significantly improves the model performance of each client (organization) without sharing private data. Specifically, pFedCR comprises two stages: multiple rounds of global model training stage and the the local personalization stage. During stage 1, an attention mechanism is incorporated into the CRNN model to adapt to various client data distributions. Leveraging inherent character data characteristics, a balanced dataset is created on the server to mitigate character imbalance. In the personalization phase, the global model is fine-tuned for one epoch to create a local model. Parameter averaging between local and global models combines personalized and global feature extraction capabilities. Finally, we fine-tune only the attention layers to enhance its focus on local personalized features. The experimental results on three real-world industrial scenario datasets show that the pFedCR algorithm can improve the performance of local personalized models by about 20% while also improving their generalization performance on other client data domains. Compared to other state-of-the-art personalized federated learning methods, pFedCR improves performance by 6% ~ 8%.