# FedDrive: Generalizing Federated Learning to Semantic Segmentation in Autonomous Driving

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.13670 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13670/

## Key facts

- Cited by 41 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Feb 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.05629/) (2016)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [Advances and Open Problems in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04977/) (2019)
- [Federated Optimization in Heterogeneous Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.06127/) (2018)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [Federated Learning: Challenges, Methods, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07873/) (2019)
- [On the Convergence of FedAvg on Non-IID Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02189/) (2019)
- [Per-Pixel Classification is Not All You Need for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06278/) (2021)
- [Adaptive Federated Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00295/) (2020)
- [Measuring the Effects of Non-Identical Data Distribution for Federated Visual Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.06335/) (2019)
- [Training Region-based Object Detectors with Online Hard Example Mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03540/) (2016)
- [FedBN: Federated Learning on Non-IID Features via Local Batch Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.07623/) (2021)
- [Federated Learning Based on Dynamic Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.04263/) (2021)
- [Self-Challenging Improves Cross-Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02454/) (2020)
- [Unified Deep Supervised Domain Adaptation and Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.10190/) (2017)
- [BiSeNet V2: Bilateral Network with Guided Aggregation for Real-time Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02147/) (2020)
- [Revisiting Batch Normalization For Practical Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.04779/) (2016)
- [FedDG: Federated Domain Generalization on Medical Image Segmentation via Episodic Learning in Continuous Frequency Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06030/) (2021)
- [Generalizing Across Domains via Cross-Gradient Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.10745/) (2018)
- [Domain Generalization for Object Recognition with Multi-task Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.07680/) (2015)
- [Privacy-preserving Federated Brain Tumour Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.00962/) (2019)
- [Multi-Institutional Deep Learning Modeling Without Sharing Patient Data: A Feasibility Study on Brain Tumor Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04304/) (2018)
- [Learning to cluster in order to transfer across domains and tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10125/) (2017)
- [Federated Visual Classification with Real-World Data Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08082/) (2020)
- [Shape-aware Meta-learning for Generalizing Prostate MRI Segmentation to Unseen Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02035/) (2020)
- [Robust Federated Learning: The Case of Affine Distribution Shifts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.08907/) (2020)
- [AutoDIAL: Automatic DomaIn Alignment Layers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.08082/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [Improving Generalization in Federated Learning by Seeking Flat Minima](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11834/) (2022)
- [Federated Learning for Connected and Automated Vehicles: A Survey of Existing Approaches and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10407/) (2023)
- [Federated Incremental Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04620/) (2023)
- [Learning Across Domains and Devices: Style-Driven Source-Free Domain Adaptation in Clustered Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02326/) (2022)
- [Exploring One-shot Semi-supervised Federated Learning with A Pre-trained Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04063/) (2023)
- [Towards Knowledge-driven Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04316/) (2023)
- [Physics-Informed Computer Vision: A Review and Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18035/) (2023)
- [Federated Domain Generalization: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01334/) (2023)
- [Centering the Value of Every Modality: Towards Efficient and Resilient Modality-agnostic Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11344/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Federated Learning for Connected and Automated Vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10677/) (2023)
- [Collaborative Learning of Anomalies with Privacy (CLAP) for Unsupervised Video Anomaly Detection: A New Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00847/) (2024)
- [FedBEVT: Federated Learning Bird's Eye View Perception Transformer in Road Traffic Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01534/) (2023)
- [MAGIC++: Efficient and Resilient Modality-Agnostic Semantic Segmentation via Hierarchical Modality Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16876/) (2024)
- [Accelerating Heterogeneous Federated Learning with Closed-form Classifiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01116/) (2024)
- [Fast-Convergent and Communication-Alleviated Heterogeneous Hierarchical Federated Learning in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19560/) (2024)
- [Beyond Local Sharpness: Communication-Efficient Global Sharpness-aware Minimization for Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03752/) (2024)
- [Window-based Model Averaging Improves Generalization in Heterogeneous Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01366/) (2023)
- [One-Shot Heterogeneous Federated Learning with Local Model-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08870/) (2023)
- [UFDA: Universal Federated Domain Adaptation with Practical Assumptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15570/) (2023)
- [Enhancing Large Vision Model in Street Scene Semantic Understanding through Leveraging Posterior Optimization Trajectory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01710/) (2025)
- [When Cars meet Drones: Hyperbolic Federated Learning for Source-Free Domain Adaptation in Adverse Weather](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13762/) (2024)
- [Feature Diversification and Adaptation for Federated Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08245/) (2024)
- [FedDrive v2: an Analysis of the Impact of Label Skewness in Federated Semantic Segmentation for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13336/) (2023)
- [Bridging Data Islands: Geographic Heterogeneity-Aware Federated Learning for Collaborative Remote Sensing Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09292/) (2024)
- [FedRSU: Federated Learning for Scene Flow Estimation on Roadside Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12862/) (2024)
- [Collaborative Visual Place Recognition through Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13324/) (2024)
- [FedPylot: Navigating Federated Learning for Real-Time Object Detection in Internet of Vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03611/) (2024)
- [On the Conflict of Robustness and Learning in Collaborative Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13700/) (2024)
- [FedSaaS: Class-Consistency Federated Semantic Segmentation via Global Prototype Supervision and Local Adversarial Harmonization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09385/) (2025)
- [Improving Generalization in Heterogeneous Federated Continual Learning via Spatio-Temporal Gradient Matching with Prototypical Coreset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.12031/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Semantic Segmentation is essential to make self-driving vehicles autonomous, enabling them to understand their surroundings by assigning individual pixels to known categories. However, it operates on sensible data collected from the users' cars; thus, protecting the clients' privacy becomes a primary concern. For similar reasons, Federated Learning has been recently introduced as a new machine learning paradigm aiming to learn a global model while preserving privacy and leveraging data on millions of remote devices. Despite several efforts on this topic, no work has explicitly addressed the challenges of federated learning in semantic segmentation for driving so far. To fill this gap, we propose FedDrive, a new benchmark consisting of three settings and two datasets, incorporating the real-world challenges of statistical heterogeneity and domain generalization. We benchmark state-of-the-art algorithms from the federated learning literature through an in-depth analysis, combining them with style transfer methods to improve their generalization ability. We demonstrate that correctly handling normalization statistics is crucial to deal with the aforementioned challenges. Furthermore, style transfer improves performance when dealing with significant appearance shifts. Official website: https://feddrive.github.io.