FedKLPR: Personalized Federated Learning for Person Re-Identification with Adaptive Pruning

Abstract: Person re-identification (Re-ID) is a fundamental task in intelligent surveillance and public safety. Federated learning (FL) offers a privacy-preserving solution by enabling collaborative model training without centralized data collection. However, applying FL to real-world re-ID systems faces two major challenges: statistical heterogeneity across clients due to non-IID data distributions, and substantial communication overhead caused by frequent transmission of large-scale models. To address these issues, we propose FedKLPR, a lightweight and communication-efficient federated learning framework for person re-identification. FedKLPR introduces four key components. First, the KL-Divergence Regularization Loss (KLL) constrains local models by minimizing the divergence from the global feature distribution, effectively mitigating the effects of statistical heterogeneity and improving convergence stability under non-IID conditions. Secondly, KL-Divergence-Prune Weighted Aggregation (KLPWA) integrates pruning ratio and distributional similarity into the aggregation process, thereby improving the robustness of the global model while significantly reducing communication overhead. Furthermore, sparse Activation Skipping (SAS) mitigates the dilution of critical parameters during the aggregation of pruned client models by excluding zero-valued weights from the update process. Finally, Cross-Round Recovery (CRR) introduces a dynamic pruning control mechanism that halts pruning when necessary, enabling deeper compression while maintaining model accuracy. Experimental results on eight benchmark datasets demonstrate that FedKLPR achieves significant communication reduction. Compared with the state-of-the-art, FedKLPR reduces 33\%-38\% communication cost on ResNet-50 and 20\%-40\% communication cost on ResNet-34, while maintaining model accuracy within 1\% degradation.