Nour Jamoussi

Nour Jamoussi, Giuseppe Serra, Photios A. Stavrou et al.

Federated learning (FL) is a widely used and impactful distributed optimization framework that achieves consensus through averaging locally trained models. While effective, this approach may not align well with Bayesian inference, where the model space has the structure of a distribution space. Taking an information-geometric perspective, we reinterpret FL aggregation as the problem of finding the barycenter of local posteriors using a prespecified divergence metric, minimizing the average discrepancy across clients. This perspective provides a unifying framework that generalizes many existing methods and offers crisp insights into their theoretical underpinnings. We then propose BA-BFL, an algorithm that retains the convergence properties of Federated Averaging in non-convex settings. In non-independent and identically distributed scenarios, we conduct extensive comparisons with statistical aggregation techniques, showing that BA-BFL achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art methods while offering a geometric interpretation of the aggregation phase. Additionally, we extend our analysis to Hybrid Bayesian Deep Learning, exploring the impact of Bayesian layers on uncertainty quantification and model calibration.

Ioannis Pitsiorlas, Nour Jamoussi, Marios Kountouris

This work introduces a novel methodology for assessing catastrophic forgetting (CF) in continual learning. We propose a new conformal prediction (CP)-based metric, termed the Conformal Prediction Confidence Factor (CPCF), to quantify and evaluate CF effectively. Our framework leverages adaptive CP to estimate forgetting by monitoring the model's confidence on previously learned tasks. This approach provides a dynamic and practical solution for monitoring and measuring CF of previous tasks as new ones are introduced, offering greater suitability for real-world applications. Experimental results on four benchmark datasets demonstrate a strong correlation between CPCF and the accuracy of previous tasks, validating the reliability and interpretability of the proposed metric. Our results highlight the potential of CPCF as a robust and effective tool for assessing and understanding CF in dynamic learning environments.