AIGC-assisted Federated Learning for Vehicular Edge Intelligence: Vehicle Selection, Resource Allocation and Model Augmentation

To leverage the vast amounts of onboard data while ensuring privacy and security, federated learning (FL) is emerging as a promising technology for supporting a wide range of vehicular applications. Although FL has great potential to improve the architecture of intelligent vehicular networks, challenges arise due to vehicle mobility, wireless channel instability, and data heterogeneity. To mitigate the issue of heterogeneous data across vehicles, artificial intelligence-generated content (AIGC) can be employed as an innovative data synthesis technique to enhance FL model performance. In this paper, we propose AIGC-assisted Federated Learning for Vehicular Edge Intelligence (GenFV). We further propose a weighted policy using the Earth Mover's Distance (EMD) to quantify data distribution heterogeneity and introduce a convergence analysis for GenFV. Subsequently, we analyze system delay and formulate a mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem to minimize system delay. To solve this MINLP NP-hard problem, we propose a two-scale algorithm. At large communication scale, we implement label sharing and vehicle selection based on velocity and data heterogeneity. At the small computation scale, we optimally allocate bandwidth, transmission power and amount of generated data. Extensive experiments show that GenFV significantly improves the performance and robustness of FL in dynamic, resource-constrained environments, outperforming other schemes and confirming the effectiveness of our approach.