Personalized Federated Learning via Domain Adaptation with an Application to Distributed 3D Printing

Over the years, Internet of Things (IoT) devices have become more powerful. This sets forth a unique opportunity to exploit local computing resources to distribute model learning and circumvent the need to share raw data. The underlying distributed and privacy-preserving data analytics approach is often termed federated learning (FL). A key challenge in FL is the heterogeneity across local datasets. In this article, we propose a new personalized FL model, PFL-DA, by adopting the philosophy of domain adaptation. PFL-DA tackles two sources of data heterogeneity at the same time: a covariate and concept shift across local devices. We show, both theoretically and empirically, that PFL-DA overcomes intrinsic shortcomings in state of the art FL approaches and is able to borrow strength across devices while allowing them to retain their own personalized model. As a case study, we apply PFL-DA to distributed desktop 3D printing where we obtain more accurate predictions of printing speed, which can help improve the efficiency of the printers.