Communication-Efficient Federated Video Human Activity Recognition via Discriminative Subspace Discovery

摘要

Federated learning (FL) enables privacy-preserving video human activity recognition without centralizing data. Despite its potential, FL remains fundamentally constrained by the high communication overhead incurred during training. Existing methods, such as model quantization, gradient sparsification and low-rank approximation, aim to mitigate this overhead but often at the cost of model expressivity, leading to reduced classification accuracy. In this work, we take a representation-centric perspective and show that for video-base activity recognition using pretrained embeddings, class-discriminative information lies in a very low-dimensional subspace, that preserves linear seperability between activity classes. Motivated by this observation, we propose Federated discriminative subspace discovery, a framework that collaboratively identify and operate within such a subspace. Instead of communicating full classifier updates, each client first projects its local video embeddings using a shared random projection matrix. It then computes the covariance of the projected embeddings and transmits this statistic to the server for aggregation. The server reconstructs a global covariance matrix, performs singular value decomposition, and selects the top-k eigenvectors that define the global class-discriminative subspace. Subsequent communication occurs only in this compact subspace. Extensive experiments on UCF101, HMDB51, and Toyota-SmartHome demonstrate that, learning and sharing the classifier in the discovered subspace, reduces communication costs by up to 61%, with a moderate drop in activity recognition accuracy compared to the full model.