FedRAV: Hierarchically Federated Region-Learning for Traffic Object Classification of Personalized Autonomous Vehicles With Guaranteed Efficiency

The emerging federated learning enables distributed autonomous vehicles to train equipped deep learning models collaboratively without exposing their raw data, providing great potential for utilizing explosively growing autonomous driving data. However, considering the complicated traffic environments and driving scenarios, deploying federated learning for autonomous vehicles is inevitably challenged by non-independent and identically distributed (Non-IID) data of vehicles, which may lead to failed convergence and low training accuracy. In this paper, we propose a novel hierarchically Federated Region-learning framework of Autonomous Vehicles (FedRAV) that adaptively divides a large area containing vehicles into sub-regions based on the defined region-wise distance, and achieves personalized vehicular models and regional models. Specifically, the architecture employs a designated hypernetwork to learn personalized mask vectors per vehicle used in the linear combination of models shared by vehicles in the same region. This approach ensures that the updated vehicular model adopts the beneficial models while discarding the unprofitable ones. We validate our FedRAV framework against existing federated learning algorithms on four real-world autonomous driving datasets in various heterogeneous settings. Extensive experiment results demonstrate that FedRAV framework achieves superior performance than the state-of-the-art algorithms, and improves the accuracy by 9.36%. The source code of FedRAV is available at: <uri xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://github.com/yjzhai-cs/FedRAV</uri>.