Federated Multi-source Domain Adaptation via Contrastive Cross-domain Semantic Alignment with Adversarial Feature Augmentation

Generalized federated learning seeks to develop robust models across distributed source domains that generalize well to the unseen target domain. Mainstream methods make strict assumptions about the availability of target domain data, limiting the flexibility and adaptability of real-world applications. In this work, we tackle a real-world challenge that has never been addressed before: federated multi-source domain adaptation for an unseen target domain. We propose federated cross-domain semantic alignment with adversarial feature augmentation, a method that enhances model generalization across domains. Our method operates in the feature space to capture both diversity and invariance between source and target domains through a two-stage local training strategy. In the adversarial training phase, a domain identifier and feature discriminator constrain the generated features to extract target-relevant information. During the contrastive learning stage, a semantic representation alignment loss (SRA) is incorporated to align class prototype distributions between source and target domains, ensuring uniform classification standards. Federated aggregation consolidates model knowledge across clients, facilitating collaborative evolution and rapid adaptation to the unseen target domain. Extensive experimental results on four prevalent datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing benchmarks across different backbones, showcasing its effectiveness in scenarios with data silos.