Selection of trustworthy collaborators in distributed systems is critical for efficient task completion, necessitating the inference of trustworthiness from their past collaboration experience. However, as a collaborator serves distinct devices across diverse scenarios in past collaborations, its trust-related data, observed from different device-specific views, is inherently multi-source, heterogeneous, and uneven in quality. Consequently, achieving accurate trust evaluations for collaborator selection remains a major challenge. To tackle these issues, we propose a novel multi-view evidential learning (MVE) based trust evaluation method. First, to accommodate the multi-source heterogeneity of observed trust-related data, we model each task owner who has interacted with a potential collaborator as an independent observational view, enabling the evaluation of the collaborator's view-specific trust. Second, to address the dynamic evolution of trust under changing conditions, we leverage the powerful long-sequence modeling capability of the Mamba model to capture the deep temporal patterns of a collaborator's trust state within each view. Furthermore, to quantify the certainty levels of view-specific trust assessments, we incorporate an evidential deep learning mechanism in MVE, which outputs trust evaluation results while quantifying the subjective uncertainty underlying them. Finally, we employ a dynamic evidential fusion strategy to adaptively integrate the multi-view evidence based on their respective quantified uncertainties, thereby yielding a final trust evaluation for the collaborator. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed MVE method outperforms baselines in both trust evaluation accuracy and task success rate.
Figures & tables
Fig. 1: An overview of the proposed MVE method for historical trust evaluation via multi-view temporal data structuring, uncertainty-aware evidential representation learning, and dynamic trust fusion.
Method
Macro-F1 ↑
MAE ↓
QS-Trust [ 1 ]
0.5934±0.0157
0.1635±0.0079
TMC [ 4 ]
0.7693±0.0072
0.0912±0.0038
DEF [ 8 ]
0.7865±0.0068
0.0859±0.0036
MVE
0.8247±0.0058
0.0734±0.0029
TABLE I: Performance comparison of MVE and baselines on historical trust evaluation. Results are reported over 5 runs.
Fig. 2: (a) MVE provides the most discriminative uncertainty estimates to achieve higher accuracy. (b) Accuracy under varying inter-view conflict ratios, highlighting the superior robustness of the proposed MVE over baseline methods.
Fig. 3: The proposed MVE achieves higher task success rates than QS-Trust.
In dynamic collaborative systems, the selection of reliable collaborators is critical to ensuring effective task execution. Existing trust evaluation methods often rely on unidimensional or scalar representations, which fail to faithfully capture a collaborator's true trustworthiness, thereby motivating a shift toward multi-dimensional trust modeling. However, due to the asynchrony of collected trust-related data across different dimensions, as well as the complex intra- and inter-dimensional dependencies embedded within these data, multi-dimensional trust evaluation remains challenging. To address these challenges, we propose TrustFormer, a task-specific multi-dimensional trust evaluation framework. Specifically, TrustFormer leverages task identifiers and device-generated timestamps to synchronize heterogeneous trust-related data across historical collaborations. It further employs cross-temporal and cross-dimensional attention mechanisms to jointly model temporal dynamics and inter-dimensional correlations, thereby effectively learning the multi-dimensional trust evolution of potential collaborators from historical performance data. In addition, according to the multi-dimensional resource requirements of tasks, potential collaborators' multi-dimensional resource trust is evaluated. Finally, by synthesizing these multi-dimensional trust profiles, the framework enables the optimal collaborator selection. Experimental results demonstrate that TrustFormer outperforms existing methods by yielding a 40.8% improvement in trust evaluation accuracy and enabling more reliable collaborator selection.
Botao Zhu, Xianbin Wang
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Western University, London, Ontario, Canada
Effective selection of trustworthy collaborators is crucial to ensuring the successful completion of collaborative tasks, which requires accurate assessments of both long-term device behavior and short-term collaborative dynamics. Consistent device behavior patterns, which are learned from historical collaborations, can be used to predict their reliability in future collaborations. However, accurately assessing device behavior based on historical collaborations remains challenging. First, behavior assessment from limited historical collaborations captures only instantaneous past behavior, failing to represent the devices' true behavior. Second, due to the temporal dependencies of device behavior, a unidirectional evaluation that relies only on earlier collaborations loses the opportunity to learn from subsequent collaborations. Addressing these challenges requires evaluating device behavior based on long-term collaborations while considering both forward and backward temporal dependencies. To this end, this work proposes a bidirectional Mamba-enabled model (BM) for long-term behavioral evaluation. For each short time slot, a graph is constructed among devices based on historical collaborations, and device behavioral features within the slot are then aggregated accordingly. Subsequently, a bidirectional Mamba model integrates these short-term representations across all time intervals, producing a stable and reliable long-term behavior evaluation for each device. Experimental results demonstrate that BM achieves higher evaluation accuracy than baseline methods, thereby enabling the selection of collaborators that maximize the value of task completion.
Botao Zhu, Xianbin Wang
Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Western University, London, Ontario N6A 3K7 CANADA
Trusted multi-view classification typically relies on a view-wise evidential fusion process: each view independently produces class evidence and uncertainty, and the final prediction is obtained by aggregating these independent opinions. While this design is modular and uncertainty-aware, it implicitly assumes that evidence from different views is numerically comparable. In practice, however, this assumption is fragile. Different views often differ in feature space, noise level, and semantic granularity, while independently trained branches are optimized only for prediction correctness, without any constraint enforcing cross-view consistency in evidence strength. As a result, the uncertainty used for fusion can be dominated by branch-specific scale bias rather than true sample-level reliability. To address this issue, we propose Trusted Multi-view learning with Unified Routing (TMUR), which decouples view-specific evidence extraction from fusion arbitration. TMUR uses view-private experts and one collaborative expert, and employs a unified router that observes the global multi-view context to generate sample-level expert weights. Soft load-balancing and diversity regularization further encourage balanced expert utilization and more discriminative expert specialization. We also provide theoretical analysis showing why independent evidential supervision does not identify a common cross-view evidence scale. Extensive experiments on 14 datasets and comparisons with 15 recent baselines demonstrate that TMUR consistently improves both classification performance and reliability. Code is available at https://github.com/YilinZhang107/TMUR.