FedADAS: Communication-Efficient Federated Distillation for On-Device Driver Yawn Recognition in Vehicular Networks
This work addresses the need for privacy-preserving, communication-efficient, and personalized driver monitoring in real-world vehicular networks, where standard federated learning is impractical due to high overhead and model homogeneity constraints.
FedADAS introduces a federated distillation framework for on-device driver yawn recognition in vehicular networks, achieving up to 9974x reduction in communication cost while maintaining high accuracy (98.3% F1-score) and enabling heterogeneous model architectures across edge devices.
Driver fatigue is a critical safety concern in advanced driver assistance systems. Driver monitoring models trained off-site on static datasets adapt poorly to real-world conditions, while standard federated learning imposes high communication overhead, assumes homogeneous architectures, and struggles with personalized driver data. We present FedADAS, a federated distillation framework enabling collaborative on-device learning across heterogeneous vehicular networks. FedADAS enables full model heterogeneity by exchanging only soft logits on a shared public dataset, allowing each vehicle to run a customized model tailored to its computational constraints. Additionally, we introduce a yawn recognition pipeline supporting training and inference on edge devices that provides two robust architectures: Performance-Efficient (99.7 MB) achieving 98.3% F1-score with 1.99ms inference time on a Jetson NANO, and a Memory-Efficient (0.6 MB) that trains an epoch in 6.12 minutes on a Jetson AGX Orin. In experiments with up to 115 edge clients, FedADAS significantly outperforms traditional federated learning approaches at higher client participation, achieving up to 9974x reduction in communication cost while maintaining a superior tradeoff between personalization and generalization under extreme data heterogeneity, demonstrating its suitability for real-world deployment. Code is available at https://opensource.silicon-austria.com/mujtabaa/fedadas