Med-MMFL: A Multimodal Federated Learning Benchmark in Healthcare

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2602.04416v1
• Date: Wed, 04 Feb 2026 10:50:15 GMT
• Title: Med-MMFL: A Multimodal Federated Learning Benchmark in Healthcare
• Authors: Aavash Chhetri, Bibek Niroula, Pratik Shrestha, Yash Raj Shrestha, Lesley A Anderson, Prashnna K Gyawali, Loris Bazzani, Binod Bhattarai,
• Abstract summary: Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative model training across decentralized medical institutions while preserving data privacy.<n>Med-MMFL is the first comprehensive MMFL benchmark for the medical domain, encompassing diverse modalities, tasks, and federation scenarios.<n>Our benchmark evaluates six representative state-of-the-art FL algorithms, covering different aggregation strategies, loss formulations, and regularization techniques.
• Score: 8.87993480369896
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative model training across decentralized medical institutions while preserving data privacy. However, medical FL benchmarks remain scarce, with existing efforts focusing mainly on unimodal or bimodal modalities and a limited range of medical tasks. This gap underscores the need for standardized evaluation to advance systematic understanding in medical MultiModal FL (MMFL). To this end, we introduce Med-MMFL, the first comprehensive MMFL benchmark for the medical domain, encompassing diverse modalities, tasks, and federation scenarios. Our benchmark evaluates six representative state-of-the-art FL algorithms, covering different aggregation strategies, loss formulations, and regularization techniques. It spans datasets with 2 to 4 modalities, comprising a total of 10 unique medical modalities, including text, pathology images, ECG, X-ray, radiology reports, and multiple MRI sequences. Experiments are conducted across naturally federated, synthetic IID, and synthetic non-IID settings to simulate real-world heterogeneity. We assess segmentation, classification, modality alignment (retrieval), and VQA tasks. To support reproducibility and fair comparison of future multimodal federated learning (MMFL) methods under realistic medical settings, we release the complete benchmark implementation, including data processing and partitioning pipelines, at https://github.com/bhattarailab/Med-MMFL-Benchmark .

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