One-Shot Federated Unsupervised Domain Adaptation with Scaled Entropy Attention and Multi-Source Smoothed Pseudo Labeling

Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) is a promising approach for privacy-preserving collaborative learning. However, it faces significant challenges when dealing with domain shifts, especially when each client has access only to its source data and cannot share it during target domain adaptation. Moreover, FL methods often require high communication overhead due to multiple rounds of model updates between clients and the server. We propose a one-shot Federated Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (FUDA) method to address these limitations. Specifically, we introduce Scaled Entropy Attention (SEA) for model aggregation and Multi-Source Pseudo Labeling (MSPL) for target domain adaptation. SEA uses scaled prediction entropy on target domain to assign higher attention to reliable models. This improves the global model quality and ensures balanced weighting of contributions. MSPL distills knowledge from multiple source models to generate pseudo labels and manage noisy labels using smoothed soft-label cross-entropy (SSCE). Our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods across four standard benchmarks while reducing communication and computation costs, making it highly suitable for real-world applications. The implementation code will be made publicly available upon publication.