# StableFDG: Style and Attention Based Learning for Federated Domain Generalization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.00227 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.00227/

## Key facts

- Cited by 21 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Nov 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.05629/) (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)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.7495/) (2014)
- [Federated Learning: Challenges, Methods, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07873/) (2019)
- [Moment Matching for Multi-Source Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01754/) (2018)
- [Deep Hashing Network for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.07522/) (2017)
- [Deeper, Broader and Artier Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03077/) (2017)
- [Learning to Generalize: Meta-Learning for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03463/) (2017)
- [Ditto: Fair and Robust Federated Learning Through Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.04221/) (2020)
- [FedBN: Federated Learning on Non-IID Features via Local Batch Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.07623/) (2021)
- [Domain Generalization with MixStyle](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02008/) (2021)
- [Local Model Poisoning Attacks to Byzantine-Robust Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11815/) (2019)
- [Attention Augmented Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09925/) (2019)
- [Adaptive Personalized Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13461/) (2020)
- [FedPAQ: A Communication-Efficient Federated Learning Method with Periodic Averaging and Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13014/) (2019)
- [Attack of the Tails: Yes, You Really Can Backdoor Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.05084/) (2020)
- [Learning to Generate Novel Domains for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.03304/) (2020)
- [FedDG: Federated Domain Generalization on Medical Image Segmentation via Episodic Learning in Continuous Frequency Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06030/) (2021)
- [Episodic Training for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00113/) (2019)
- [Domain Generalization via Conditional Invariant Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.08479/) (2018)
- [Uncertainty Modeling for Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03958/) (2022)
- [Exact Feature Distribution Matching for Arbitrary Style Transfer and Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07740/) (2022)
- [Learning to Generalize Unseen Domains via Memory-based Multi-Source Meta-Learning for Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00417/) (2020)
- [Learning to Learn with Variational Information Bottleneck for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07645/) (2020)
- [Federated Domain Generalization for Image Recognition via Cross-Client Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.00912/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [DapperFL: Domain Adaptive Federated Learning with Model Fusion Pruning for Edge Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05823/) (2024)
- [Federated Unsupervised Domain Generalization using Global and Local Alignment of Gradients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16304/) (2024)
- [Federated Domain Generalization with Data-free On-server Matching Gradient](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.14653/) (2025)
- [FedAlign: Federated Domain Generalization with Cross-Client Feature Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.15486/) (2025)
- [Selective Attention Federated Learning: Improving Privacy and Efficiency for Clinical Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11793/) (2025)
- [Federated Out-of-Distribution Generalization: A Causal Augmentation View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.19882/) (2025)
- [Federated Deconfounding and Debiasing Learning for Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.04979/) (2025)
- [Boosting Federated Domain Generalization: Understanding the Role of Advanced Pre-Trained Architectures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13527/) (2024)
- [Global Intervention and Distillation for Federated Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00850/) (2025)
- [FedCCRL: Federated Domain Generalization with Cross-Client Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11267/) (2024)
- [Using Diffusion Models as Generative Replay in Continual Federated Learning -- What will Happen?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.06618/) (2024)
- [FedDAG: Federated Domain Adversarial Generation Towards Generalizable Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13967/) (2025)
- [Federated Active Learning for Target Domain Generalisation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02247/) (2023)
- [FedGTST: Boosting Global Transferability of Federated Models via Statistics Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13045/) (2024)
- [PARDON: Privacy-Aware and Robust Federated Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.22622/) (2024)
- [Decentralized Domain Generalization with Style Sharing: Formal Model and Convergence Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.06235/) (2025)
- [Token-Level Prompt Mixture with Parameter-Free Routing for Federated Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.21063/) (2025)
- [Multi-Source Collaborative Style Augmentation and Domain-Invariant Learning for Federated Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.10152/) (2025)
- [Unified Alignment Protocol: Making Sense of the Unlabeled Data in New Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21010/) (2025)
- [TreeFedDG: Alleviating Global Drift in Federated Domain Generalization for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18268/) (2025)
- [Federated Domain Generalization with Latent Space Inversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10224/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Traditional federated learning (FL) algorithms operate under the assumption that the data distributions at training (source domains) and testing (target domain) are the same. The fact that domain shifts often occur in practice necessitates equipping FL methods with a domain generalization (DG) capability. However, existing DG algorithms face fundamental challenges in FL setups due to the lack of samples/domains in each client's local dataset. In this paper, we propose StableFDG, a style and attention based learning strategy for accomplishing federated domain generalization, introducing two key contributions. The first is style-based learning, which enables each client to explore novel styles beyond the original source domains in its local dataset, improving domain diversity based on the proposed style sharing, shifting, and exploration strategies. Our second contribution is an attention-based feature highlighter, which captures the similarities between the features of data samples in the same class, and emphasizes the important/common characteristics to better learn the domain-invariant characteristics of each class in data-poor FL scenarios. Experimental results show that StableFDG outperforms existing baselines on various DG benchmark datasets, demonstrating its efficacy.