ClusterSSFDA: Clustered Semi-Supervised Federated Domain Adaptation

Most Federated Learning (FL) approaches assume a single global model is updated locally by clients and aggregated at the server. However, the single-model assumption is often too restrictive, especially in scenarios involving a large amount of different users, where adaptation to different domains and personalization are necessary to improve model performance. In this paper, we propose ClusterSSFDA, the first FL framework to leverage clustering for addressing domain shifts in Semi-Supervised Federated Learning (SSFL), where clients collect data without supervision. In particular, ClusterSSFDA clusters clients based on their models' agreement, and updates multiple models at the server, each tailored to a cluster of similar clients. ClusterSSFDA significantly improves adaptation in SSFL, striking a balance between a single global model, which may be suboptimal in the presence of domain shift among the clients, and fully personalized models, which would be trained on too small datasets. Our experiments on real-world scenarios with multiple levels of domain shift demonstrate that ClusterSSFDA outperforms existing methods, achieving superior performance in challenging SSFL settings.