When Cars Meet Drones: Hyperbolic Federated Learning for Source-Free Domain Adaptation in Adverse Weather

Giulia Rizzoli, Matteo Caligiuri, Donald Shenaj, Francesco Barbato, Pietro Zanuttigh; Proceedings of the Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2025, pp. 1587-1596

In Federated Learning (FL) multiple clients collaboratively train a global model without sharing private data. In semantic segmentation the Federated source Free Domain Adaptation (FFREEDA) setting is of particular interest where clients undergo unsupervised training after supervised pretraining at the server side. While few recent works address FL for autonomous vehicles intrinsic real-world challenges such as the presence of adverse weather conditions and the existence of different autonomous agents are still unexplored. To bridge this gap we address both problems and introduce a new federated semantic segmentation setting where both car and drone clients co-exist and collaborate. Specifically we propose a novel approach for this setting which exploits a batch-norm weather-aware strategy to dynamically adapt the model to the different weather conditions while hyperbolic space prototypes are used to align the heterogeneous client representations. Finally we introduce FLYAWARE the first semantic segmentation dataset with adverse weather data for aerial vehicles.