Zero-Shot Decentralized Federated Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Masano, Alessio, Pennisi, Matteo, Salanitri, Federica Proietto, Spampinato, Concetto, Bellitto, Giovanni
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Masano, Alessio
Pennisi, Matteo
Salanitri, Federica Proietto
Spampinato, Concetto
Bellitto, Giovanni
author_facet Masano, Alessio
Pennisi, Matteo
Salanitri, Federica Proietto
Spampinato, Concetto
Bellitto, Giovanni
contents CLIP has revolutionized zero-shot learning by enabling task generalization without fine-tuning. While prompting techniques like CoOp and CoCoOp enhance CLIP's adaptability, their effectiveness in Federated Learning (FL) remains an open challenge. Existing federated prompt learning approaches, such as FedCoOp and FedTPG, improve performance but face generalization issues, high communication costs, and reliance on a central server, limiting scalability and privacy. We propose Zero-shot Decentralized Federated Learning (ZeroDFL), a fully decentralized framework that enables zero-shot adaptation across distributed clients without a central coordinator. ZeroDFL employs an iterative prompt-sharing mechanism, allowing clients to optimize and exchange textual prompts to enhance generalization while drastically reducing communication overhead. We validate ZeroDFL on nine diverse image classification datasets, demonstrating that it consistently outperforms--or remains on par with--state-of-the-art federated prompt learning methods. More importantly, ZeroDFL achieves this performance in a fully decentralized setting while reducing communication overhead by 118x compared to FedTPG. These results highlight that our approach not only enhances generalization in federated zero-shot learning but also improves scalability, efficiency, and privacy preservation--paving the way for decentralized adaptation of large vision-language models in real-world applications.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_26462
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Zero-Shot Decentralized Federated Learning
Masano, Alessio
Pennisi, Matteo
Salanitri, Federica Proietto
Spampinato, Concetto
Bellitto, Giovanni
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
CLIP has revolutionized zero-shot learning by enabling task generalization without fine-tuning. While prompting techniques like CoOp and CoCoOp enhance CLIP's adaptability, their effectiveness in Federated Learning (FL) remains an open challenge. Existing federated prompt learning approaches, such as FedCoOp and FedTPG, improve performance but face generalization issues, high communication costs, and reliance on a central server, limiting scalability and privacy. We propose Zero-shot Decentralized Federated Learning (ZeroDFL), a fully decentralized framework that enables zero-shot adaptation across distributed clients without a central coordinator. ZeroDFL employs an iterative prompt-sharing mechanism, allowing clients to optimize and exchange textual prompts to enhance generalization while drastically reducing communication overhead. We validate ZeroDFL on nine diverse image classification datasets, demonstrating that it consistently outperforms--or remains on par with--state-of-the-art federated prompt learning methods. More importantly, ZeroDFL achieves this performance in a fully decentralized setting while reducing communication overhead by 118x compared to FedTPG. These results highlight that our approach not only enhances generalization in federated zero-shot learning but also improves scalability, efficiency, and privacy preservation--paving the way for decentralized adaptation of large vision-language models in real-world applications.
title Zero-Shot Decentralized Federated Learning
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.26462