Domain-Aware Suppression and Aggregation for Federated DG ReID

Federated domain generalization in person re-identification (FedDG-ReID) aims to learn a privacy-preserving server model from decentralized client source domains that generalizes to unseen domains. Existing approaches enhance the generalizability of the server model by increasing the diversity of client person data. However, these methods overlook that ReID model parameters are easily biased by client-specific data distributions, leading to the capture of excessive domain-specific identity information. Such identity information (e.g., clothing style) struggles with identity information in unseen domains, thereby hindering the generalization ability of the server model. To address this, we propose a novel FedDG-ReID framework, which mainly consists of Domain-aware Parameter Suppression (DPS) and Domain-invariant Weighted Aggregation (DWA), called FedSupWA. Specifically, DPS adaptively attenuates the update magnitude of the parameters based on the fit of the parameters to the client's domain, encouraging the model to focus on more generalized domain-independent identity information, such as pedestrian contours, and other consistent information across domains. DWA enhances the server model’s generalization by evaluating the effectiveness of the client model in maintaining the consistency of pedestrian identities to measure the importance of the learned domain-independent identity information and assigning greater aggregation weights to clients that contribute more generalized information. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of FedSupWA, showing that it achieves state-of-the-art performance.