Analysis and Optimization of Wireless Multimodal Federated Learning on Modal Heterogeneity

Multimodal federated learning (MFL) is a distributed framework for training multimodal models without uploading local multimodal data of clients, thereby effectively protecting client privacy. However, multimodal data is commonly heterogeneous across diverse clients, where each client possesses only a subset of all modalities, renders conventional analysis results and optimization methods in unimodal federated learning inapplicable. In addition, fixed latency demand and limited communication bandwidth pose significant challenges for deploying MFL in wireless scenarios. To optimize the wireless MFL performance on modal heterogeneity, this paper proposes a joint client scheduling and bandwidth allocation (JCSBA) algorithm based on a decision-level fusion architecture with adding a unimodal loss function. Specifically, with the decision results, the unimodal loss functions are added to both the training objective and local update loss functions to accelerate multimodal convergence and improve unimodal performance. To characterize MFL performance, we derive a closed-form upper bound related to client and modality scheduling and minimize the derived bound under the latency, energy, and bandwidth constraints through JCSBA. Experimental results on multimodal datasets demonstrate that the JCSBA algorithm improves the multimodal accuracy and the unimodal accuracy by 4.06% and 2.73%, respectively, compared to conventional algorithms.