# FedPylot: Navigating Federated Learning for Real-Time Object Detection in Internet of Vehicles

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.03611 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03611/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 50 of its 91 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 50)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.05629/) (2016)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [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)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2524/) (2013)
- [YOLOv4: Optimal Speed and Accuracy of Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10934/) (2020)
- [YOLO9000: Better, Faster, Stronger](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08242/) (2016)
- [YOLOX: Exceeding YOLO Series in 2021](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08430/) (2021)
- [Adaptive Federated Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00295/) (2020)
- [YOLOv7: Trainable bag-of-freebies sets new state-of-the-art for real-time object detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02696/) (2022)
- [Measuring the Effects of Non-Identical Data Distribution for Federated Visual Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.06335/) (2019)
- [Model-Contrastive Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16257/) (2021)
- [Spatial Pyramid Pooling in Deep Convolutional Networks for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.4729/) (2014)
- [DETRs Beat YOLOs on Real-time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08069/) (2023)
- [Towards Personalized Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00710/) (2021)
- [Distance-IoU Loss: Faster and Better Learning for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08287/) (2019)
- [Flower: A Friendly Federated Learning Research Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.14390/) (2020)
- [YOLOv9: Learning What You Want to Learn Using Programmable Gradient Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13616/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Deep Learning Techniques for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.07738/) (2019)
- [FedML: A Research Library and Benchmark for Federated Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.13518/) (2020)
- [Computer Vision for Autonomous Vehicles: Problems, Datasets and State of the Art](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05519/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Enabling Federated Object Detection for Connected Autonomous Vehicles: A Deployment-Oriented Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.01868/) (2025)
- [QFed: Parameter-Compact Quantum-Classical Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.09809/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) emerges as a pivotal component for autonomous driving and intelligent transportation systems (ITS), by enabling low-latency big data processing in a dense interconnected network that comprises vehicles, infrastructures, pedestrians and the cloud. Autonomous vehicles are heavily reliant on machine learning (ML) and can strongly benefit from the wealth of sensory data generated at the edge, which calls for measures to reconcile model training with preserving the privacy of sensitive user data. Federated learning (FL) stands out as a promising solution to train sophisticated ML models in vehicular networks while protecting the privacy of road users and mitigating communication overhead. This paper examines the federated optimization of the cutting-edge YOLOv7 model to tackle real-time object detection amid data heterogeneity, encompassing unbalancedness, concept drift, and label distribution skews. To this end, we introduce FedPylot, a lightweight MPI-based prototype to simulate federated object detection experiments on high-performance computing (HPC) systems, where we safeguard server-client communications using hybrid encryption. Our study factors in accuracy, communication cost, and inference speed, thereby presenting a balanced approach to the challenges faced by autonomous vehicles. We demonstrate promising results for the applicability of FL in IoV and hope that FedPylot will provide a basis for future research into federated real-time object detection. The source code is available at https://github.com/cyprienquemeneur/fedpylot.