Out-of-Distribution Federated Distillation with Domain-Aware Proxy

Abstract

Federated Learning is a distributed machine learning paradigm that trains a global model by aggregating local clients without sharing private data of each client. Federated Distillation (FD) builds upon this paradigm by leveraging knowledge distillation to exchange soft predictions on proxy data instead of model parameters, enabling more efficient communication and supporting heterogeneous model collaboration. However, FD models trained on In-Distribution data are hardly adapted to Out-of-Distribution (OOD) scenarios. In this paper, we propose a domain-aware proxy selection framework to better adopt proxy data for OOD problems. The experimental results show that the proposed models effectively address the challenges of distribution shifts under OOD with and without proxy data by achieving average 82.9\% and 80.6\% over existing works on standard benchmarks. The codes and data are released in https://anonymous.4open.science/r/DPS-FD-8596.