Federated Unsupervised Domain Generalization Using Global and Local Alignment of Gradients

作者：Farhad Pourpanah, Mahdiyar Molahasani, Milad Soltany, Michael Greenspan, Ali Etemad · 发表于：Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence · 年份：2025 · DOI：10.1609/aaai.v39i19.34197 · 被引用次数：7 · 研究领域：Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning

We address the problem of federated domain generalization in an unsupervised setting for the first time. We first theoretically establish a connection between domain shift and alignment of gradients in unsupervised federated learning and show that aligning the gradients at both client and server levels can facilitate the generalization of the model to new (target) domains. Building on this insight, we propose a novel method named FedGaLA, which performs gradient alignment at the client level to encourage clients to learn domain-invariant features, as well as global gradient alignment at the server to obtain a more generalized aggregated model. To empirically evaluate our method, we perform various experiments on four commonly used multi-domain datasets, PACS, OfficeHome, DomainNet, and TerraInc. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method which outperforms comparable baselines. Ablation and sensitivity studies demonstrate the impact of different components and parameters in our approach.