An Inference Similarity-based Federated Learning Framework for Enhancing Collaborative Perception in Autonomous Driving

Abstract

Autonomous vehicles use onboard sensors to sense the surrounding environment. In complex autonomous driving scenarios, the detection and recognition capabilities are constrained, which may result in serious accidents. An efficient way to enhance the detection and recognition capabilities is establishing collaborations with the neighbor vehicles. However, the collaborations introduce additional challenges in terms of the data heterogeneity, communication cost, and data privacy. In this paper, a novel personalized federated learning framework is proposed for addressing the challenges and enabling efficient collaborations in autonomous driving environment. For obtaining a global model, vehicles perform local training and transmit logits to a central unit instead of the entire model, and thus the communication cost is minimized, and the data privacy is protected. Then, the inference similarity is derived for capturing the characteristics of data heterogeneity. The vehicles are divided into clusters based on the inference similarity and a weighted aggregation is performed within a cluster. Finally, the vehicles download the corresponding aggregated global model and train a personalized model which is personalized for the cluster that has similar data distribution, so that accuracy is not affected by heterogeneous data. Experimental results demonstrate significant advantages of our proposed method in improving the efficiency of collaborative perception and reducing communication cost.