# FedCARE: A Multi-Objective Personalised Federated Learning Framework for Smart Healthcare

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03498 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.03498/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [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)
- [Federated Learning on Non-IID Data Silos: An Experimental Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02079/) (2021)
- [An Efficient Framework for Clustered Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04088/) (2020)
- [Clustered Federated Learning: Model-Agnostic Distributed Multi-Task Optimization under Privacy Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01991/) (2019)
- [Flower: A Friendly Federated Learning Research Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.14390/) (2020)
- [Federated Learning for Smart Healthcare: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.08834/) (2021)
- [Heterogeneous Federated Learning: State-of-the-art and Research Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10616/) (2023)
- [Parameterized Knowledge Transfer for Personalized Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02862/) (2021)
- [Vertical Federated Learning: Concepts, Advances and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12814/) (2022)
- [FedHome: Cloud-Edge based Personalized Federated Learning for In-Home Health Monitoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07450/) (2020)
- [Multi-objective Evolutionary Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07478/) (2018)
- [Federated Multi-Objective Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09866/) (2023)
- [Advances in Robust Federated Learning: A Survey with Heterogeneity Considerations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09839/) (2024)
- [FedPref: Federated Learning Across Heterogeneous Multi-objective Preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13604/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative model training across distributed healthcare institutions without centralising sensitive patient data. However, real-world healthcare federations are often characterised not only by non-IID data, but also by heterogeneous clinical objectives and partially overlapping feature spaces. Different hospitals may optimise distinct and potentially conflicting objectives, such as mortality risk prediction, readmission reduction, or length-of-stay estimation, while also retaining institution-specific clinical features that cannot be shared with other participants. Existing personalised FL methods mainly address statistical heterogeneity, whereas multi-objective FL approaches typically learn a shared global model without explicit client-level adaptation. To address these limitations, we propose FedCARE, a multi-objective personalised FL framework for smart healthcare services. FedCARE follows a two-stage training strategy. First, it learns a shared global backbone from common clinical features using Pareto-driven multi-objective federated optimisation. Second, each client independently fine-tunes the shared backbone using its private features and local clinical objectives, enabling institution-specific personalisation without additional communication overhead. We implement FedCARE in a cloud-based client-server federated deployment on the Melbourne Research Cloud and evaluate it on two real-world healthcare datasets, MIMIC-III and Diabetes 130-US Hospitals. Experimental results show that FedCARE consistently outperforms standard FL, multi-objective FL, and personalised FL baselines, achieving up to 12.5% AUROC improvement and 32.0% MAE reduction over FedAvg.