# OmniFM: Toward Modality-Robust and Task-Agnostic Federated Learning for Heterogeneous Medical Imaging

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.21660 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.21660/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 40 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.05629/) (2016)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [Federated Optimization in Heterogeneous Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.06127/) (2018)
- [FiLM: Visual Reasoning with a General Conditioning Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.07871/) (2017)
- [Adaptive Federated Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00295/) (2020)
- [Measuring the Effects of Non-Identical Data Distribution for Federated Visual Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.06335/) (2019)
- [Model-Contrastive Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16257/) (2021)
- [Ditto: Fair and Robust Federated Learning Through Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.04221/) (2020)
- [FedBN: Federated Learning on Non-IID Features via Local Batch Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.07623/) (2021)
- [Federated Learning Based on Dynamic Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.04263/) (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)
- [SLAKE: A Semantically-Labeled Knowledge-Enhanced Dataset for Medical Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09542/) (2021)
- [MONAI: An open-source framework for deep learning in healthcare](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.02701/) (2022)
- [Personalized Federated Learning: A Meta-Learning Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.07948/) (2020)
- [Personalized Federated Learning with First Order Model Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.08565/) (2020)
- [PromptFL: Let Federated Participants Cooperatively Learn Prompts Instead of Models -- Federated Learning in Age of Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.11625/) (2022)
- [Lower Bounds and Optimal Algorithms for Personalized Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02372/) (2020)
- [FedALA: Adaptive Local Aggregation for Personalized Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.01197/) (2022)
- [FedCLIP: Fast Generalization and Personalization for CLIP in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13485/) (2023)
- [FedDAT: An Approach for Foundation Model Finetuning in Multi-Modal Heterogeneous Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12305/) (2023)
- [Fair Federated Medical Image Segmentation via Client Contribution Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16520/) (2023)
- [The Federated Tumor Segmentation (FeTS) Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05874/) (2021)
- [Prompt Federated Learning for Weather Forecasting: Toward Foundation Models on Meteorological Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.09152/) (2023)
- [Strong Baselines for Parameter Efficient Few-Shot Fine-tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01917/) (2023)
- [FedCP: Separating Feature Information for Personalized Federated Learning via Conditional Policy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01217/) (2023)
- [IOP-FL: Inside-Outside Personalization for Federated Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08467/) (2022)
- [FedPerfix: Towards Partial Model Personalization of Vision Transformers in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09160/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [FM2: Unified Federated Foundation Models for Heterogeneous Multimodal Medical Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.13386/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Federated learning (FL) has become a promising paradigm for collaborative medical image analysis, yet existing frameworks remain tightly coupled to task-specific backbones and are fragile under heterogeneous imaging modalities. Such constraints hinder real-world deployment, where institutions vary widely in modality distributions and must support diverse downstream tasks. To address this limitation, we propose OmniFM, a modality- and task-agnostic FL framework that unifies training across classification, segmentation, super-resolution, visual question answering, and multimodal fusion without re-engineering the optimization pipeline. OmniFM builds on a key frequency-domain insight: low-frequency spectral components exhibit strong cross-modality consistency and encode modality-invariant anatomical structures. Accordingly, OmniFM integrates (i) Global Spectral Knowledge Retrieval to inject global frequency priors, (ii) Embedding-wise Cross-Attention Fusion to align representations, and (iii) Prefix-Suffix Spectral Prompting to jointly condition global and personalized cues, together regularized by a Spectral-Proximal Alignment objective that stabilizes aggregation. Experiments on real-world datasets show that OmniFM consistently surpasses state-of-the-art FL baselines across intra- and cross-modality heterogeneity, achieving superior results under both fine-tuning and training-from-scratch setups.