Domain Borders Are There to Be Crossed With Federated Few-Shot Adaptation

TL;DR

This paper introduces FedAcross+, a federated learning framework that enables efficient domain adaptation on resource-limited devices, effectively handling covariate shifts and streaming data in industrial settings.

Contribution

It presents a scalable, low-overhead federated adaptation method that leverages a frozen backbone and adaptation layer, extending to streaming data and sporadic updates.

Findings

FedAcross+ achieves competitive domain adaptation on low-end devices.

The framework effectively handles covariate shift and streaming data.

It supports sporadic model updates in resource-constrained environments.

Abstract

Federated Learning has emerged as a leading paradigm for decentralized, privacy-preserving learning, particularly relevant in the era of interconnected edge devices equipped with sensors. However, the practical implementation of Federated Learning faces three primary challenges: the need for human involvement in costly data labelling processes for target adaptation, covariate shift in client device data collection due to environmental factors affecting sensors, leading to discrepancies between source and target samples, and the impracticality of continuous or regular model updates in resource-constrained environments due to limited data transmission capabilities and technical constraints on channel availability and energy efficiency. To tackle these issues, we expand upon an efficient and scalable Federated Learning framework tailored for real-world client adaptation in industrial settings. This framework leverages a pre-trained source model comprising a deep backbone, an adaptation module, and a classifier running on a powerful server. By freezing the backbone and classifier during client adaptation on resource-constrained devices, we allow the domain adaptive linear layer to handle target domain adaptation, thus minimizing overall computational overhead. Furthermore, this setup, designated as FedAcross+, is extended to encompass the processing of streaming data, thereby rendering the solution suitable for non-stationary environments. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of FedAcross+ in achieving competitive adaptation on low-end client devices with limited target samples, successfully addressing the challenge of domain shift. Moreover, our framework accommodates sporadic model updates within resource-constrained environments, ensuring practical and seamless deployment.