Collaborative Trustworthy Foundation Model Framework: An Environmental Sustainability Use-Case to Detect Contamination Objects in Organic Waste Streams
摘要
This work introduces a privacy-preserving framework that integrates foundation models with federated learning through a synergistic application using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). Our three-stage pipeline—centralized pretraining, federated fine-tuning, and knowledge distillation—enables efficient and GDPR-compliant model updates. Using Florence-2 and the Hugging Face PEFT library, we demonstrate the framework on contamination object detection in organic waste streams across five distributed sites. Results show that the federated fusion model outperforms both centralized and local baselines in terms of IoU and detection accuracy, highlighting the effectiveness of LoRA-based adaptation for real-world, decentralized settings..