PICSR: Prototype-Informed Cross-Silo Router for Federated Learning

Abstract

Federated Learning is an effective approach for learning from data distributed across multiple institutions. While most existing studies are aimed at improving predictive accuracy of models, little work has been done to explain knowledge differences between institutions and the benefits of collaboration. Understanding these differences is critical in cross-silo federated learning domains, e.g., in healthcare or banking, where each institution or silo has a different underlying distribution and stakeholders want to understand how their institution compares to their partners. We introduce Prototype-Informed Cross-Silo Router (PICSR) which utilizes a mixture of experts approach to combine local models derived from multiple silos. Furthermore, by computing data similarity to prototypical samples from each silo, we are able to ground the router's predictions in the underlying dataset distributions. Experiments on a real-world heart disease prediction dataset show that PICSR retains high performance while enabling further explanations on the differences among institutions compared to a single black-box model.