Adaptive Prototype Knowledge Transfer for Federated Learning with Mixed Modalities and Heterogeneous Tasks

Multimodal Federated Learning (MFL) with mixed modalities enables unimodal and multimodal clients to collaboratively train models while ensuring clients' privacy. As a representative sample of local data, prototypes offer an approach with low resource consumption and no reliance on prior knowledge for MFL with mixed modalities. However, existing prototype-based MFL methods assume unified labels across clients and identical tasks per client, which is impractical in MFL with mixed modalities. In this work, we propose an Adaptive prototype-based Multimodal Federated Learning (AproMFL) framework for mixed modalities to address the aforementioned issues. Our AproMFL transfers knowledge through adaptively-constructed prototypes without unified labels. Clients adaptively select prototype construction methods in line with labels; server converts client prototypes into unified multimodal prototypes and cluster them to form global prototypes. To address model aggregation issues in task heterogeneity, we develop a client relationship graph-based scheme to dynamically adjust aggregation weights. Furthermore, we propose a global prototype knowledge transfer loss and a global model knowledge transfer loss to enable the transfer of global knowledge to local knowledge. Experimental results show that AproMFL outperforms four baselines on three highly heterogeneous datasets (α=0.1) and two heterogeneous tasks, with the optimal results in accuracy and recall being 0.42%~6.09% and 1.6%~3.89% higher than those of FedIoT (FedAvg-based MFL), respectively.