English

DeFed-GMM-DaDiL: A Decentralized Federated Framework for Domain Adaptation

Machine Learning 2026-05-07 v1

Abstract

Decentralized multi-source domain adaptation seeks to transfer knowledge from multiple heterogeneous and related source domains to an unlabeled target domain in a decentralized setting. We address this challenge through a fully decentralized federated approach, DeFed-GMM-DaDiL, an extension of the GMM-Dataset Dictionary Learning (DaDiL) framework. Each client models its dataset as a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM), and the federation jointly approximates them via labeled Wasserstein barycenters of shared, learnable GMM atoms. This design enables adaptation without a central server while preserving clients' privacy. We empirically study the stability of the learned representations in scenarios where the target domain has missing classes. Empirical results demonstrate that DeFed-GMM-DaDiL maintains stable and consistent shared representations across clients, effectively reconstructs missing classes, and achieves competitive performance on multi-source domain adaptation benchmarks.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.04324,
  title  = {DeFed-GMM-DaDiL: A Decentralized Federated Framework for Domain Adaptation},
  author = {Rebecca Clain and Eduardo Fernandes Montesuma and Fred Ngole Mboula},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.04324},
  year   = {2026}
}