cs.CROct 19, 2026

Peer-Relative Trust-Guided Update Screening for Robust Semi-Decentralized Federated Learning under Label-Flipping Attacks

Authors: Ajay Kumar Shrestha, Sandhya Joshi

Organizations: Vancouver Island University, Nanaimo BC V9R 5S5, Canada

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Abstract

Trust and reputation mechanisms can reduce the influence of malicious clients in federated learning (FL), but strict update filtering is difficult under non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) data because honest local updates may temporarily reduce performance on a shared validation proxy. Extending an earlier trust-based semi-decentralized FL (SDFL) framework, this paper operationalizes the trust signals and introduces peer-relative update screening that combines a robust validation-utility score with direction- and norm-based update quality. The method is evaluated with 50 MNIST clients, 20% persistent label-flip attackers, Dirichlet heterogeneity levels of 0.5 and 0.1, 100 communication rounds, and five paired random seeds. Under moderate heterogeneity, the proposed method reaches 98.37% final accuracy while rejecting 95.82% of malicious updates and retaining 90.30% of benign updates; the final benign and malicious trust distributions are completely separated (KS=1.00). Under severe heterogeneity, it reaches 95.25% accuracy, rejects 88.55% of malicious updates, and retains 76.90% of benign updates (KS=0.96). Trust weighting alone preserves slightly higher utility in the most heterogeneous condition, but accepts all malicious submissions. The results therefore distinguish influence mitigation from explicit containment and quantify the utility-selectivity trade-off introduced by screening. The study provides an empirically validated off-chain governance core that can feed blockchain-based audit and incentive layers in SDFL.

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