This study implemented a comprehensive experimental framework for analysing FL performance using standard FL aggregation protocols FedAvg, FedProx, and SCAFFOLD in conjunction with Differential Privacy mechanisms; specifically, the Gaussian noise mechanism with Rényi Differential Privacy (RDP) accountants.
Abstract
Overview: Federated Learning (FL) is a type of machine learning in which multiple clients use their own data to train a model. This does not require sending the raw data from each client to a central server. However, FL is currently very vulnerable to several types of attacks, including inference, model inversion, and membership inference. In this study, we have implemented a comprehensive experimental framework for analysing FL performance using standard FL aggregation protocols FedAvg, FedProx, and SCAFFOLD in conjunction with Differential Privacy (DP) mechanisms; specifically, the Gaussian noise mechanism with Rényi Differential Privacy (RDP) accountants. Our experiments all used K = 100 simulated clients, with heterogeneous data distribution across the entire federation (non-IID), and the respective clean datasets used were MNIST and CIFAR-10. For example, in our IID scenarios, our DP-FedAvg protocol achieved an accuracy of 84.9% on MNIST with ε = 1.0 and δ = 10^-5 (i.e., no privacy guarantees and 92.6% reuse of the same parameters). This corresponds to a 7.7-percentage-point trade-off in accuracy for provable privacy. In our non-IID scenario, we achieved an accuracy of 72.8% for the exact same privacy parameters and an LDA αᴸᴸᴸ = 0.5. We systematically analyse how various combinations of clipping norms on gradients, noise multipliers, and client participation rates converged. All results have been reported as-is, along with the associated standard deviation across each of the five independent sample runs that we performed using different random seed values. Finally, our framework will assist practitioners deploying privacy-friendly FL within either healthcare, banking, or Internet of Things environments.
Federated learning is a decentralised machine-learning approach in which several clients jointly build a shared model without moving their raw data to one location. Rising concerns around privacy, tightening regulation, and restrictions on how data may be owned or shared have made this approach increasingly attractive in practice. Although federated learning lowers privacy exposure relative to centralised training, deploying it in practice is complicated by clients whose data are unevenly distributed and non-identically distributed, by clients that participate inconsistently, and by training that can converge unpredictably. To obtain global models that train reliably and consistently even when client data are heterogeneous, this work puts forward a federated learning system built around privacy preservation. The design follows a client–server pattern in which a coordinating server aggregates updates from local models using weights that account for imbalance among participants. The behaviour of the resulting system is examined methodically across several data-distribution regimes — IID, mildly non-IID, and severely non-IID. The experiments show that the framework converges reliably and delivers predictive accuracy that holds up well, especially in the more difficult non-IID cases. Compared with conventional federated learning baselines, the approach shows greater robustness and steadier performance across successive training rounds. Because it is simple to implement, repeatable, and built with real deployment in mind, the architecture suits privacy-sensitive, decentralised use cases such as distributed intelligent systems, industrial monitoring, and healthcare analytics.
Shyam Patel, S. Khan· 2026 International Conferenc...· 0 citations
Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative model training across multiple clients in a privacy-preserving manner. However, the employment of homomorphic encryption algorithms might lead to high computational cost while the application of differential privacy (DP) methods would sacrifice model performance. To establish efficient and secure FL system as well as maintaining competitive performance, we introduce a DP-enabled cascaded filter with novel model-aggregation mechanism. Taking the model parameters of one client for example, dimensions with large absolute values and significant variations are selected by the cascaded filter and regarded as important dimensions. After that, random noise are added to these important dimensions for data security. Finally, the model parameters will be sent to the central server for aggregation. Unlike traditional DP-based approaches, our method considers each dimension’s informational importance, i.e., both absolute value and its variation. We theoretically prove the convergence of our method and verify the effectiveness on different scenarios including four datasets. The experimental results suggest that our method outperforms the other ones from literature under both IID and non-IID conditions while achieving high level of efficiency and privacy protection performance.
Zhiqiang Chen, Yuchen Jiang, Ray Y. Zhong et al.· IEEE Transactions on Informa...· 0 citations
Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a revolutionary paradigm in distributed machine learning, enabling multiple decentralized clients to collaboratively train models without sharing their local raw data. Despite its inherent privacy-centric design, FL remains vulnerable to sophisticated privacy attacks, such as gradient leakage and membership inference, which can reconstruct sensitive user data from communicated model updates. In order to reduce these vulnerabilities, we integrate privacy-preserving mechanisms most notably Differential Privacy (DP) and Cryptographic Protocols into the training procedure. These privacy constraints, however, come with utility loss and convergence slowdown thus highlighting a basic conflict between (differential) privacy on one side and high-order model accuracy and efficiency at another. In our paper, we carefully examine how to use convex optimization methods systematically in terms of performing this rich multi-dimensional trade-off. We center around the rigorous implementation of privacy-preserving FL couched as a bounded convex optimization task, studying how traditional and state-of-the-art optimization algorithms retain strong convergence rates even under durable privacy constraints. We benchmark the performance of these primary optimization frameworks, such as FedAvg, FedProx, and Accelerated Gradient Methods, when adopted on different privacy budgets. Theoretically, we analyze the impact of differential privacy on gradient variance in algorithms and experimentally validate how adaptive optimization (Specifically by AMSGrad) and proximal regularization can account for this noise-induced increase to enable faster convergence with a tight guarantee of differential privacy. To summarize, this work provides a unified approach for aiding the design of state-of-the-art privacy-preserving distributed learning systems that are also utility-optimal and is an important step towards using such approaches in high-stakes domains like healthcare or finance.
A. M., Nitish Kumar· International Journal of Mat...· 0 citations
Federated Learning (FL) enables participants to collaboratively train a model without sharing raw data. Traditional FL models depend on a central server and full model sharing, leading to a significant issue in healthcare related to privacy concerns and communication overhead. However, to address such issues, we introduce Decentralized Federated Learning with Partial Head Sharing DFL-PHS, a framework that eliminates the central server, allowing peer-to-peer model updates sharing. Instead of sharing entire model parameters, participants only share a subset of weights from the final dense layers, minimizing information breach while maintaining the model’s performance. We apply our proposed framework to COVID-19 chest X-ray binary classification, where we conduct a comparative study across four scenarios: local training, centralized FL (CFL), single-site training (SST) and DFL-PHS. Evaluations are conducted on three dataset sizes (small, medium, large) and four partial sharing ratios (25%, 50%, 75%, 100%). We also assess privacy through a Membership-Inference Attack (MIA), with only 25% head sharing, the attack operates at or below chance (ROC-AUC 0.37 with advantage -0.30 on the small scale and ROC–AUC ≈0.50\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\approx 0.50$$\end{document} with advantage ≈0.00\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\approx 0.00$$\end{document} on the large scale), indicating no reliable membership signal. Empirical findings indicate that DFL-PHS, in many configurations, competes with or outperforms CFL, attaining F1-scores of 0.965 and recall rates surpassing 0.98, even under minimal weight-sharing conditions. These results validate DFL-PHS as a privacy-preserving and scalable system for distributed FL. While evaluated on a single radiography dataset, our framework is dataset-agnostic; we plan broader validation on non-medical and other benchmarks as future work.
Reem Nabha, Anis Laouiti, A. Samhat· International Journal of Inf...· 0 citations
A novel FL framework is presented, FedPhoenix, that stochastically re-sets partial parameters in each round to destroy some features of the global model, guiding FL training to learn multiple generalized features for inference rather than specific overfitting features.
Jiahao Wu, Ming Hu, Yanxin Yang et al.· Advances in Neural Informati...· 1 citation
Federated learning is appealing for privacy-sensitive network systems, yet its practical deployment remains hindered by the following three recurring challenges: (1) client drift under non-IID data, (2) vulnerability to corrupted updates, and (3) the communication cost of repeated model exchange. Most existing approaches address these issues in isolation. While analytically convenient, this separation often fails to reflect real-world conditions. For instance, defenses against poisoning may suppress useful updates, while personalization and compression can alter the aggregation geometry itself. In this paper, we study these effects jointly and propose URP-FL, a compact training framework that integrates reliability-aware aggregation, local regularization for drift control, and sparse client uploads. We provide theoretical analysis establishing a convergence bound with distinct terms capturing optimization error, data heterogeneity, and adversarial impact. Experiments on a non-IID image classification benchmark with sign-flip and label-flip attacks demonstrate the benefits of the unified design. Compared to FedAvg and FedProx, this URP-FL maintains accuracy under attack while reducing transmitted parameters by approximately 75%. Rather than presenting a production ready system, it offers a reproducible and technically coherent step toward federated learning that is more robust under realistic conditions.
Hua Kun, Wei Wang· 2026 International Conferenc...· 0 citations