Federated Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Charalampakis, Evangelos, Mygdalis, Vasileios, Pitas, Ioannis
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Charalampakis, Evangelos
Mygdalis, Vasileios
Pitas, Ioannis
author_facet Charalampakis, Evangelos
Mygdalis, Vasileios
Pitas, Ioannis
contents This work explores the application of Federated Learning (FL) to Unsupervised Semantic image Segmentation (USS). Recent USS methods extract pixel-level features using frozen visual foundation models and refine them through self-supervised objectives that encourage semantic grouping. These features are then grouped to semantic clusters to produce segmentation masks. Extending these ideas to federated settings requires feature representation and cluster centroid alignment across distributed clients, an inherently difficult task under heterogeneous data distributions in the absence of supervision. To address this, we propose FUSS (Federated Unsupervised image Semantic Segmentation) which is, to our knowledge, the first framework to enable fully decentralized, label-free semantic segmentation training. FUSS introduces novel federation strategies that promote global consistency in feature and prototype space, jointly optimizing local segmentation heads and shared semantic centroids. Experiments on both benchmark and real-world datasets, including binary and multi-class segmentation tasks, show that FUSS consistently outperforms local-only client trainings as well as extensions of classical FL algorithms under varying client data distributions. To fully support reproducibility, the source code, data partitioning scripts, and implementation details are publicly available at: https://github.com/evanchar/FUSS
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_23292
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Federated Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation
Charalampakis, Evangelos
Mygdalis, Vasileios
Pitas, Ioannis
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
This work explores the application of Federated Learning (FL) to Unsupervised Semantic image Segmentation (USS). Recent USS methods extract pixel-level features using frozen visual foundation models and refine them through self-supervised objectives that encourage semantic grouping. These features are then grouped to semantic clusters to produce segmentation masks. Extending these ideas to federated settings requires feature representation and cluster centroid alignment across distributed clients, an inherently difficult task under heterogeneous data distributions in the absence of supervision. To address this, we propose FUSS (Federated Unsupervised image Semantic Segmentation) which is, to our knowledge, the first framework to enable fully decentralized, label-free semantic segmentation training. FUSS introduces novel federation strategies that promote global consistency in feature and prototype space, jointly optimizing local segmentation heads and shared semantic centroids. Experiments on both benchmark and real-world datasets, including binary and multi-class segmentation tasks, show that FUSS consistently outperforms local-only client trainings as well as extensions of classical FL algorithms under varying client data distributions. To fully support reproducibility, the source code, data partitioning scripts, and implementation details are publicly available at: https://github.com/evanchar/FUSS
title Federated Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.23292