FMT-SVM: A Communication-Efficient Federated Multi-Task Support Vector Machine Framework for Healthcare

Abstract

Federated learning has become a promising paradigm in the training of decentralized machine learning models across clients without sharing raw data, thereby preserving privacy. Current federated support vector machine methods are mainly based on the learning of a single global model, which inadequately addresses the challenges presented by heterogeneous and non-IID client data distributions. To overcome these limitations, we propose FMT-SVM, a novel federated multi-task learning framework that jointly trains both binary and multi-class classification tasks within each client, where the client uses a unified convolutional neural network encoder to extract common features among tasks, which are passed to task-specific linear SVM heads dedicated to each classification task. By leveraging a primal optimization integrating task covariance and global consensus regularization, FMT-SVM explicitly models relationships between heterogeneous tasks and enforces alignment across clients, effectively handling the non-IID nature of data distributions. Unlike traditional FL methods that exchange entire model parameters or large support vector sets, our method communicates only the compact SVM heads during aggregation, greatly reducing communication overhead and enhancing scalability for clients with limited bandwidth. To further enhance privacy, Gaussian differential privacy mechanisms are applied to client updates, balancing privacy preservation with predictive performance. Experiments are performed on two medical image datasets: the Pediatric Pneumonia Dataset and the Breast Ultrasound dataset, demonstrating that the FMT-SVM framework achieves competitive accuracy on both binary and multi-class tasks while maintaining communication efficiency and privacy guarantees. These results highlight the capability of the proposed FMT-SVM framework as a practical, scalable, and privacy-aware solution for the federated true multi-task learning problem in sensitive healthcare applications.