Federated Joint Learning for Domain and Class Generalization

Efficient fine-tuning of visual-language models like CLIP has become crucial due to their large-scale parameter size and extensive pretraining requirements. Existing methods typically address either the issue of unseen classes or unseen domains in isolation, without considering a joint framework for both.

In this paper, we propose Federated Joint Learning for Domain and Class Generalization, termed FedDCG, a novel approach that addresses both class and domain generalization in federated learning settings. Our method introduces a domain grouping strategy where class-generalized networks are trained within each group to prevent decision boundary confusion.

During inference, we aggregate class-generalized results based on domain similarity, effectively integrating knowledge from both class and domain generalization. Specifically, a learnable network is employed to enhance class generalization capabilities, and a decoupling mechanism separates general and domain-specific knowledge, improving generalization to unseen domains.

Extensive experiments across various datasets show that FedDCG outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in terms of accuracy and robustness.