How to Combine Variational Bayesian Networks in Federated Learning

Federated Learning enables multiple data centers to train a central model collaboratively without exposing any confidential data. Even though deterministic models are capable of performing high prediction accuracy, their lack of calibration and capability to quantify uncertainty is problematic for safety-critical applications. Different from deterministic models, probabilistic models such as Bayesian neural networks are relatively well-calibrated and able to quantify uncertainty alongside their competitive prediction accuracy. Both of the approaches appear in the federated learning framework; however, the aggregation scheme of deterministic models cannot be directly applied to probabilistic models since weights correspond to distributions instead of point estimates. In this work, we study the effects of various aggregation schemes for variational Bayesian neural networks. With empirical results on three image classification datasets, we observe that the degree of spread for an aggregated distribution is a significant factor in the learning process. Hence, we present an investigation on the question of how to combine variational Bayesian networks in federated learning, while providing benchmarks for different aggregation settings.

Uncertainty-Based Dynamic Graph Neighborhoods For Medical Segmentation

In recent years, deep learning based methods have shown success in essential medical image analysis tasks such as segmentation. Post-processing and refining the results of segmentation is a common practice to decrease the misclassifications originating from the segmentation network. In addition to widely used methods like Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) which focus on the structure of the segmented volume/area, a graph-based recent approach makes use of certain and uncertain points in a graph and refines the segmentation according to a small graph convolutional network (GCN). However, there are two drawbacks of the approach: most of the edges in the graph are assigned randomly and the GCN is trained independently from the segmentation network. To address these issues, we define a new neighbor-selection mechanism according to feature distances and combine the two networks in the training procedure. According to the experimental results on pancreas segmentation from Computed Tomography (CT) images, we demonstrate improvement in the quantitative measures. Also, examining the dynamic neighbors created by our method, edges between semantically similar image parts are observed. The proposed method also shows qualitative enhancements in the segmentation maps, as demonstrated in the visual results.