FedPIDAvg: A PID controller inspired aggregation method for Federated Learning

Abstract

This paper presents FedPIDAvg, the winning submission to the Federated Tumor Segmentation Challenge 2022 (FETS22). Inspired by FedCostWAvg, our winning contribution to FETS21, we contribute an improved aggregation strategy for federated and collaborative learning. FedCostWAvg is a weighted averaging method that not only considers the number of training samples of each cluster but also the size of the drop of the respective cost function in the last federated round. This can be interpreted as the derivative part of a PID controller (proportional-integral-derivative controller). In FedPIDAvg, we further add the missing integral term. Another key challenge was the vastly varying size of data samples per center. We addressed this by modeling the data center sizes as following a Poisson distribution and choosing the training iterations per center accordingly. Our method outperformed all other submissions.