Back

An In-Depth Evaluation of Federated Learning on Biomedical Natural Language Processing

Peng, L.; Luo, G.; Zhou, S.; Chen, J.; Xu, Z.; Zhang, R.; Sun, J.

2023-11-27 health informatics
10.1101/2023.11.24.23299002 medRxiv
Show abstract

Language models (LMs) such as BERT and GPT have revolutionized natural language processing (NLP). However, the medical field faces challenges in training LMs due to limited data access and privacy constraints imposed by regulations like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA) and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Federated learning (FL) offers a decentralized solution that enables collaborative learning while ensuring data privacy. In this study, we evaluated FL on 2 biomedical NLP tasks encompassing 8 corpora using 6 LMs. Our results show that: 1) FL models consistently outperformed models trained on individual clients data and sometimes performed comparably with models trained with polled data; 2) with the fixed number of total data, FL models training with more clients produced inferior performance but pre-trained transformer-based models exhibited great resilience. 3) FL models significantly outperformed large language models using zero-/one-shot learning and offered lightning inference speed.

Matching journals

The top 8 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.