Federated Learning Aggregation

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Overview

Federated learning aggregation studies how to combine knowledge from clients that keep their data local, so they can train useful models together. Methods range from FedAvg-style weighted averaging to client weighting, clustering, prototypes, and personalization; newer approaches also align low-rank or function-space updates when model parameters are not directly compatible. Robust filters and trust scores address poisoned or unreliable updates, while secure, asynchronous, and over-the-air aggregation target privacy, delays, and communication costs. No single strategy works best across settings: performance depends on client heterogeneity and participation, and practical designs must trade off accuracy, fairness, security, privacy, and efficiency.

Latest papers

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270 papers38 papers in the last four weeks, up 15% on the four weeks before. 0.2% of all new papers.

Feb 24, 2026

ProxyFL: A Proxy-Guided Framework for Federated Semi-Supervised Learning

Federated Semi-Supervised Learning (FSSL) aims to collaboratively train a global model across clients by leveraging partially-annotated local data in a privacy-preserving manner. In FSSL, data heterogeneity is a challenging issue, which exists both across clients and within clients. External heterogeneity refers to the data distribution discrepancy across different clients, while internal heterogeneity represents the mismatch between labeled and unlabeled data within clients. Most FSSL methods typically design fixed or dynamic parameter aggregation strategies to collect client knowledge on the server (external) and / or filter out low-confidence unlabeled samples to reduce mistakes in local client (internal). But, the former is hard to precisely fit the ideal global distribution via direct weights, and the latter results in fewer data participation into FL training. To this end, we propose a proxy-guided framework called ProxyFL that focuses on simultaneously mitigating external and internal heterogeneity via a unified proxy. I.e., we consider the learnable weights of classifier as proxy to simulate the category distribution both locally and globally. For external, we explicitly optimize global proxy against outliers instead of direct weights; for internal, we re-include the discarded samples into training by a positive-negative proxy pool to mitigate the impact of potentially-incorrect pseudo-labels. Insight experiments & theoretical analysis show our significant performance and convergence in FSSL.

Duowen Chen, Yan Wang

Shanghai Key Laboratory of Multidimensional Information Processing, East China Normal University

Federated LearningHeterogeneous Federated LearningFederated Learning Aggregation
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Feb 23, 2026

Personalized Longitudinal Medical Report Generation via Temporally-Aware Federated Adaptation

Longitudinal medical report generation is clinically important yet remains challenging due to strict privacy constraints and the evolving nature of disease progression. Although federated learning (FL) enables collaborative training without data sharing, existing FL methods largely overlook longitudinal dynamics by assuming stationary client distributions, making them unable to model temporal shifts across visits or patient-specific heterogeneity-ultimately leading to unstable optimization and suboptimal report generation. We introduce Federated Temporal Adaptation (FTA), a federated setting that explicitly accounts for the temporal evolution of client data. Building upon this setting, we propose FedTAR, a framework that integrates demographic-driven personalization with time-aware global aggregation. FedTAR generates lightweight LoRA adapters from demographic embeddings and performs temporal residual aggregation, where updates from different visits are weighted by a meta-learned temporal policy optimized via first-order MAML. Experiments on J-MID (1M exams) and MIMIC-CXR demonstrate consistent improvements in linguistic accuracy, temporal coherence, and cross-site generalization, establishing FedTAR as a robust and privacy-preserving paradigm for federated longitudinal modeling.

He Zhu, Ren Togo, Takahiro Ogawa +8

Hokkaido University

Medical Report GenerationFederated LearningFederated Learning AggregationFederated Fine-Tuning
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Feb 22, 2026

Taming Preconditioner Drift: Unlocking the Potential of Second-Order Optimizers for Federated Learning on Non-IID Data

Second-order optimizers can significantly accelerate large-scale training, yet their naive federated variants are often unstable or even diverge on non-IID data. We show that a key culprit is preconditioner drift: client-side second-order training induces heterogeneous curvature-defined geometries (i.e., preconditioner coordinate systems), and server-side model averaging updates computed under incompatible metrics, corrupting the global descent direction. To address this geometric mismatch, we propose FedPAC, a preconditioner alignment and correction framework for reliable federated second-order optimization. FedPAC explicitly decouples parameter aggregation from geometry synchronization by: (i) Alignment (i.e.,aggregating local preconditioners into a global reference and warm-starting clients via global preconditioner); and (ii) Correction (i.e., steering local preconditioned updates using a global preconditioned direction to suppress long-term drift). We provide drift-coupled non-convex convergence guarantees with linear speedup under partial participation. Empirically, FedPAC consistently improves stability and accuracy across vision and language tasks, achieving up to 5.8%5.8\% absolute accuracy gain on CIFAR-100 with ViTs. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/FedPAC-8B24.

Junkang Liu, Fanhua Shang, Hongying Liu +3

College of Intelligence and Computing, Tianjin University, Tianjin, China · Medical School, Tianjin University, Tianjin, China · Peng Cheng Lab, Shenzhen, China +2

Federated LearningSecond-Order OptimizationNon-IID Federated LearningFederated Learning Aggregation
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Feb 20, 2026

Communication-Efficient Byzantine-Robust Federated Conformal Prediction via Partial Sharing

We propose PRISM-FCP (Partial shaRing and robust calIbration with Statistical Margins for Federated Conformal Prediction), a communication-efficient Byzantine-robust federated conformal prediction framework that uses partial model sharing to mitigate stochastic model-poisoning attacks during training and histogram-based filtering to mitigate adversarial calibration submissions. Existing robust FCP approaches primarily address adversarial behavior during calibration, leaving training-stage poisoning to separate robust-training mechanisms. PRISM-FCP instead considers the coupling between the two stages. During training, clients partially share updates by transmitting only MM of DD parameters per round. Under the stated stochastic attack model, this attenuates the expected energy of each Byzantine client's perturbation contribution to the aggregate by a factor of M/DM/D relative to full sharing. When this benefit outweighs the optimization slowdown caused by partial updates, it can reduce training error and improve interval efficiency. During calibration, the server uses client-provided characterization vectors to filter suspected Byzantine clients before estimating the conformal quantile from the retained clients. Experiments on synthetic benchmarks and the UCI Superconductivity and YearPredictionMSD datasets, including Gaussian, ALIE, and sign-flipping training-stage attacks, demonstrate near-nominal empirical coverage and favorable communication--performance tradeoffs in the studied settings.

Ehsan Lari, Reza Arablouei, Stefan Werner

Department of Electronic Systems, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, 7491 Trondheim, Norway · Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, Pullenvale, QLD 4069, Australia · Department of Information and Communications Engineering, Aalto University, 00076, Finland

Federated Conformal PredictionFederated Learning AggregationByzantine-Robust Federated LearningConformal PredictionFederated Learning
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Feb 20, 2026

PenTiDef: Decentralized Federated Intrusion Detection System with Differential Privacy and Latent-Space Defense via Blockchain Coordination in IIoT

This paper proposes PenTiDef, a fully decentralized, privacy-preserving, and poisoning-resilient framework for decentralized federated IDS (DFL-IDS). PenTiDef synergistically integrates three key components: (i) client-side Distributed Differential Privacy (DDP) with stochastic Gaussian noise to protect gradient leakage, (ii) a lightweight latent-space defense module that extracts and compresses penultimate-layer representations (PLRs) into stable Latent Semantic Representations (LSRs) via AutoEncoder, followed by Centered Kernel Alignment (CKA) and K-Means clustering for robust malicious update detection without auxiliary datasets, and (iii) a permissioned blockchain layer with smart contracts that orchestrates on-chain validation, secure FedAvg aggregation, and immutable auditability, eliminating any central server. Extensive experiments on CIC-IDS2018 and Edge-IIoTSet under both IID and realistic non-IID settings, with adversary ratios up to 40%, demonstrate that PenTiDef consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines (FLARE and FedCC) in detection accuracy and F1-score while maintaining lower training overhead. By jointly addressing privacy, robustness, and decentralization in a unified secure aggregation protocol, PenTiDef provides a practical and scalable solution for trustworthy collaborative intrusion detection in heterogeneous, adversarial IIoT environments.

Phan The Duy, Nghi Hoang Khoa, Nguyen Tran Anh Quan +3

Information Security Lab, University of Information Technology, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. · Vietnam National University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. · VNU-HCM Information Security Center, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

Blockchain-Based Federated LearningIoT Intrusion DetectionFederated LearningByzantine-Robust Federated LearningFederated Learning AggregationDifferentially Private Federated Learning
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Feb 19, 2026

FLoRG: Federated Fine-tuning with Low-rank Gram Matrices and Procrustes Alignment

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning techniques such as low-rank adaptation (LoRA) enable large language models (LLMs) to adapt to downstream tasks efficiently. Federated learning (FL) further facilitates this process by enabling collaborative fine-tuning across distributed clients without sharing private data. However, the use of two separate low-rank matrices in LoRA for federated fine-tuning introduces two types of challenges. First, aggregation error can arise from separately aggregating the two low-rank matrices. Second, even if the server aggregates the product of two low-rank matrices, it needs to decompose the aggregated matrix back into low-rank matrices. Since the decomposition is not unique, it can lead to decomposition drift. To tackle the aforementioned challenges, we propose federated low-rank Gram-matrix aggregation (FLoRG), a federated fine-tuning framework which employs a single low-rank matrix for fine-tuning and aggregates its Gram matrix (i.e., the matrix of inner products of its column vectors). FLoRG can eliminate the aggregation error and reduce the communication overhead. It also minimizes the decomposition drift by introducing a Procrustes alignment approach which aligns the decomposed matrix between consecutive fine-tuning rounds for consistent updates. We theoretically analyze the convergence of FLoRG and prove that adopting the Procrustes alignment results in a tighter convergence bound. Experimental results across multiple LLM fine-tuning benchmarks demonstrate that FLoRG outperforms five state-of-the-art baseline schemes by providing higher downstream task accuracy and can reduce the communication overhead by up to 2041×\times.

Chuiyang Meng, Ming Tang, Vincent W. S. Wong

The University of British Columbia · Southern University of Science and Technology

LLM Fine-TuningFederated Fine-TuningFederated LearningFederated Learning AggregationLow-Rank Adaptation
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Feb 18, 2026

U-FedTomAtt: Ultra-lightweight Federated Learning with Attention for Tomato Disease Recognition

Federated learning has emerged as a privacy-preserving and efficient approach for deploying intelligent agricultural solutions. Accurate edge-based diagnosis across geographically dispersed farms is crucial for recognising tomato diseases in sustainable farming. Traditional centralised training aggregates raw data on a central server, leading to communication overhead, privacy risks and latency. Meanwhile, edge devices require lightweight networks to operate effectively within limited resources. In this paper, we propose U-FedTomAtt, an ultra-lightweight federated learning framework with attention for tomato disease recognition in resource-constrained and distributed environments. The model comprises only 245.34K parameters and 71.41 MFLOPS. First, we propose an ultra-lightweight neural network with dilated bottleneck (DBNeck) modules and a linear transformer to minimise computational and memory overhead. To mitigate potential accuracy loss, a novel local-global residual attention (LoGRA) module is incorporated. Second, we propose the federated dual adaptive weight aggregation (FedDAWA) algorithm that enhances global model accuracy. Third, our framework is validated using three benchmark datasets for tomato diseases under simulated federated settings. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves 0.9910% and 0.9915% Top-1 accuracy and 0.9923% and 0.9897% F1-scores on SLIF-Tomato and PlantVillage tomato datasets, respectively.

Romiyal George, Sathiyamohan Nishankar, Selvarajah Thuseethan +4

Department of Computer Engineering, University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka. · Faculty of Science and Technology, Charles Darwin University, Australia. · Canadian Institute for Cybersecurity, University of New Brunswick, Canada. +1

Lightweight Neural NetworksFederated LearningPlant Disease ClassificationFederated Learning AggregationEdge MLAttention Mechanisms
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Feb 17, 2026

On the Geometric Coherence of Global Aggregation in Federated Graph Neural Networks

Federated learning over graph-structured data exposes a fundamental mismatch between standard aggregation mechanisms and the operator nature of graph neural networks (GNNs). While federated optimization treats model parameters as elements of a shared Euclidean space, GNN parameters induce graph-dependent message-passing operators whose semantics depend on underlying topology. Under structurally and distributionally heterogeneous client graph distributions, local updates correspond to perturbations of distinct operator manifolds. Linear aggregation of such updates mixes geometrically incompatible directions, producing global models that converge numerically yet exhibit degraded relational behavior. We formalize this phenomenon as a geometric failure of global aggregation in cross-domain federated GNNs, characterized by destructive interference between operator perturbations and loss of coherence in message-passing dynamics. This degradation is not captured by conventional metrics such as loss or accuracy, as models may retain predictive performance while losing structural sensitivity. To address this, we propose GGRS (Global Geometric Reference Structure), a server-side aggregation framework operating on a data-free proxy of operator perturbations. GGRS enforces geometric admissibility via directional alignment, subspace compatibility, and sensitivity control, preserving the structure of the induced message-passing operator.

Chethana Prasad Kabgere, Shylaja SS

Department of Computer Science and Engineering, PES University, Bengaluru, Karnataka, 560085, India

Federated Graph LearningFederated Learning AggregationGraph Neural NetworksHeterogeneous Federated Learning
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Feb 17, 2026

Fractional-Order Federated Learning

Federated learning (FL) allows remote clients to train a global model collaboratively while protecting client privacy. Despite its privacy-preserving benefits, FL has significant drawbacks, including slow convergence, high communication cost, and non-independent-and-identically-distributed (non-IID) data. In this work, we present a novel FedAvg variation called Fractional-Order Federated Averaging (FOFedAvg), which incorporates Fractional-Order Stochastic Gradient Descent (FOSGD) to capture long-range relationships and deeper historical information. By introducing memory-aware fractional-order updates, FOFedAvg improves communication efficiency and accelerates convergence while mitigating instability caused by heterogeneous, non-IID client data. We compare FOFedAvg against a broad set of established federated optimization algorithms on benchmark datasets including MNIST, FEMNIST, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, EMNIST, the Cleveland heart disease dataset, Sent140, PneumoniaMNIST, and Edge-IIoTset. Across a range of non-IID partitioning schemes, FOFedAvg is competitive with, and often outperforms, these baselines in terms of test performance and convergence speed. On the theoretical side, we prove that FOFedAvg converges to a stationary point under standard smoothness and bounded-variance assumptions for fractional order 0<α≤10<α\le 1. Together, these results show that fractional-order, memory-aware updates can substantially improve the robustness and effectiveness of federated learning, offering a practical path toward distributed training on heterogeneous data.

Mohammad Partohaghighi, Roummel Marcia, YangQuan Chen

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California at Merced, USA · Department of Applied Mathematics, University of California Merced, Merced, CA, USA · Mechatronics, Embedded Systems and Automation (MESA) Lab, Department of Mechanical Engineering, School of Engineering, University of California, Merced, CA 95343, USA

Federated LearningFederated Learning AggregationCommunication-Efficient Distributed TrainingNon-IID Federated LearningStochastic Gradient Descent
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Feb 17, 2026

FedPSA: Modeling Behavioral Staleness in Asynchronous Federated Learning

Asynchronous Federated Learning (AFL) has emerged as a significant research area in recent years. By not waiting for slower clients and executing the training process concurrently, it achieves faster training speed compared to traditional federated learning. However, due to the staleness introduced by the asynchronous process, its performance may degrade in some scenarios. Existing methods often use the round difference between the current model and the global model as the sole measure of staleness, which is coarse-grained and lacks observation of the model itself, thereby limiting the performance ceiling of asynchronous methods. In this paper, we propose FedPSA (Parameter Sensitivity-based Asynchronous Federated Learning), a more fine-grained AFL framework that leverages parameter sensitivity to measure model obsolescence and establishes a dynamic momentum queue to assess the current training phase in real time, thereby adjusting the tolerance for outdated information dynamically. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets and comparisons with various methods demonstrate the superior performance of FedPSA, achieving up to 6.37% improvement over baseline methods and 1.93% over the current state-of-the-art method.

Chaoyi Lu, Yiding Sun, Zhichuan Yang +3

Asynchronous Federated LearningFederated Learning Aggregation
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Feb 17, 2026

SCENE OTA-FD: Self-Centering Noncoherent Estimator for Over-the-Air Federated Distillation

We propose SCENE (Self-Centering Noncoherent Estimator), a pilot-free and phase-invariant aggregation primitive for over-the-air federated distillation (OTA-FD). Each device maps its soft-label (class-probability) vector to nonnegative transmit energies under constant per-round power and constant-envelope signaling (PAPR near 1). At the server, a self-centering energy estimator removes the noise-energy offset and yields an unbiased estimate of the weighted soft-label average, with variance decaying on the order of 1/(SM) in the number of receive antennas M and repetition factor S. We also develop a pilot-free ratio-normalized variant that cancels unknown large-scale gains, provide a convergence bound consistent with coherent OTA-FD analyses, and present an overhead-based crossover comparison. SCENE targets short-coherence and hardware-constrained regimes, where avoiding per-round CSI is essential: it trades a modest noncoherent variance constant for zero uplink pilots, unbiased aggregation, and hardware-friendly transmission, and can outperform coherent designs when pilot overhead is non-negligible.

Hao Chen, Zavareh Bozorgasl

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Boise State University, Boise, ID 83712 USA.

Federated Learning AggregationOver-the-Air Federated LearningFederated Knowledge Distillation
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Feb 16, 2026

pFedNavi: Structure-Aware Personalized Federated Vision-Language Navigation for Embodied AI

Vision-Language Navigation VLN requires large-scale trajectory instruction data from private indoor environments, raising significant privacy concerns. Federated Learning FL mitigates this by keeping data on-device, but vanilla FL struggles under VLNs' extreme cross-client heterogeneity in environments and instruction styles, making a single global model suboptimal. This paper proposes pFedNavi, a structure-aware and dynamically adaptive personalized federated learning framework tailored for VLN. Our key idea is to personalize where it matters: pFedNavi adaptively identifies client-specific layers via layer-wise mixing coefficients, and performs fine-grained parameter fusion on the selected components (e.g., the encoder-decoder projection and environment-sensitive decoder layers) to balance global knowledge sharing with local specialization. We evaluate pFedNavi on two standard VLN benchmarks, R2R and RxR, using both ResNet and CLIP visual representations. Across all metrics, pFedNavi consistently outperforms the FedAvg-based VLN baseline, achieving up to 7.5% improvement in navigation success rate and up to 7.8% gain in trajectory fidelity, while converging 1.38x faster under non-IID conditions.

Qingqian Yang, Hao Wang, Sai Qian Zhang +6

Stevens Institute of Technology · Hoboken, NJ, USA · New York University +9

Federated Learning AggregationNon-IID Federated LearningVision-Language NavigationFederated LearningHeterogeneous Federated Learning
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Feb 9, 2026

ERIS: Enhancing the Privacy-Utility-Scalability Trade-Off in Federated Learning via Federated Shard Aggregation

Scaling Federated Learning (FL) to billion-parameter models forces a challenging trade-off between privacy, scalability, and model utility. Existing solutions often tackle these challenges in isolation, sacrificing accuracy, relying on costly cryptographic tools, or introducing communication and optimization inefficiencies that affect convergence. We introduce ERIS, an FL framework centered on Federated Shard Aggregation (FSA), a novel mechanism that partitions each client update into non-overlapping shards whose aggregation is distributed across multiple client-side aggregators. FSA removes the central aggregation bottleneck, limits the information visible to any single observer, and preserves the centralized FL update after reassembly. ERIS can further readily integrate Distributed Shifted Compression (DSC) to reduce transmitted payloads and exposed coordinates. We prove that ERIS preserves convergence under standard assumptions and bounds mutual information leakage by the observable fraction of each update, decreasing with the number of client-side aggregators, and with the compression level when DSC is enabled. Experiments across image and text tasks, including large language models, show that ERIS achieves FedAvg-level utility while substantially reducing communication bottlenecks and improving robustness to membership inference and reconstruction attacks, without relying on heavy cryptography or utility-degrading perturbations.

Dario Fenoglio, Pasquale Polverino, Akash Dhasade +3

Universit`a della Svizzera italiana Lugano, Switzerland · Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA, United States

Federated LearningFederated Learning AggregationPrivacy-Preserving Federated LearningPrivacy-Preserving MLCommunication-Efficient Distributed Training
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Dec 28, 2025

Mechanistic Evidence for Preserved-but-Misaligned Representations in Non-IID FedAvg

Federated Averaging (FedAvg) often degrades under non-IID client data, but it remains unclear whether this degradation reflects the loss of client-learned representations or a failure to use representations that are still present. We study this question mechanistically in sparse client-trained vision models, using dense-model controls to test whether the observed effects depend on sparsity. Our analysis combines class-specific circuit discovery, linear probing of frozen representations, head-only finetuning, and sparse feature dictionaries. Across CNN and ResNet models on CIFAR-10 and Fashion-MNIST, severe label skew can drive some per-class accuracies near zero even when class-specific internal structure remains recoverable. Linear probes substantially outperform the aggregated classifier, head-only finetuning partially restores accuracy, and USAE transfer reveals a largely shared feature basis between IID and non-IID models. Together, these diagnostics suggest that, in our setting, non-IID FedAvg degradation is not fully explained by representational erasure; it also reflects misalignment between preserved internal structure and the final prediction pathway.

Muhammad Haseeb, Salaar Masood, Muhammad Abdullah Sohail +2

Department of Computer Science, Lahore University of Management Sciences, Lahore, Pakistan.

Federated Learning AggregationNon-IID Federated LearningFederated Learning
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Dec 21, 2025

FedVideoMAE: Efficient Federated Video Moderation with Differential Privacy and Secure Aggregation

Short-form video moderation is increasingly pushed toward edge and privacy-sensitive settings, where users may intend videos for a limited audience, such as friends or private groups, but sending raw clips to a central server can broaden exposure, consume bandwidth, and add moderation latency. Federated learning can keep videos on device, but unprotected model updates may still leak information, and full-video backbones are expensive to communicate. We present FedVideoMAE, a privacy-preserving federated framework for violence detection that adapts a frozen VideoMAE backbone with lightweight LoRA and prompt parameters. Each training round combines self-supervised masked video reconstruction with client-side differential privacy and pairwise masked aggregation (SA) of adapter updates. Violence labels are held out from federation and used only for downstream evaluation, separating private representation learning from supervised assessment. On RWF-2000, exchanging 5,518,848 trainable parameters instead of the 156,371,328-parameter instantiated pretraining state gives a 28.3x model-state payload ratio. FedVideoMAE reaches 77.25% test accuracy without DP or SA, while accuracy under DP+SA remains in the 65.25-66.00% range. Transfer experiments on RLVS and binary UCF-Crime show similar behavior. These results characterize the privacy-utility trade-off for edge video moderation. Code is available at: https://github.com/zyt-599/FedVideoMAE

Ziyuan Tao, Chuanzhi Xu, Sandaru Jayawardana +4

School of Computing, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia · School of Computer Science, The University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia · School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia

Federated Learning AggregationVideo Content ModerationVideo Representation LearningPrivacy-Preserving MLSecure AggregationFederated Learning
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Dec 3, 2025

Over-the-Air Federated Learning: Rethinking Edge AI Through Signal Processing

Over-the-Air Federated Learning (AirFL) is an emerging paradigm that tightly integrates wireless signal processing and distributed machine learning to enable scalable AI at the network edge. By exploiting wireless superposition over a shared multiple-access channel, AirFL turns simultaneous transmissions of local model updates into an analog aggregate at the receiver, thereby reducing communication latency, bandwidth usage, and energy consumption in wireless aggregation domains. This article develops a design-oriented tutorial view of analog AirFL. We organize existing schemes according to the signal-processing mechanism used to enable AirFL aggregation: transmitter-side channel compensation and power control, receiver-side equalization and high-dimensional processing, or learning-aware aggregation weighting. This viewpoint leads to three representative classes -- CSIT-aware, blind, and weighted AirFL -- and clarifies their assumptions, performance tradeoffs, complexity, and deployment limitations. We further discuss synchronization, digital and hybrid analog-digital realization, and open research directions for integrating AirFL into practical wireless edge-AI systems.

Seyed Mohammad Azimi-Abarghouyi, Carlo Fischione, Kaibin Huang

School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden · Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China

Federated Learning AggregationCommunication-Efficient Distributed TrainingWireless CommunicationsOver-the-Air Federated LearningFederated Learning
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Nov 4, 2025

A Byzantine-Robust Federated Learning with Nesterov Momentum

We investigate robust federated learning, where a group of workers collaboratively train a shared model under the orchestration of a central server in the presence of Byzantine adversaries capable of arbitrary and potentially malicious behaviors. To improve communication efficiency while retaining resilience against such adversaries, we propose a Byzantine-resilient Nesterov-augmented federated learning (Byrd-NAFL) algorithm. Byrd-NAFL applies Nesterov's momentum at the server to the output of any soft γγ-Byzantine resilient aggregation rule, while each worker only computes and uploads a stochastic gradient, which keeps the workers stateless, as desired for intermittently participating Internet of Things devices. For smooth non-convex losses, we establish a finite-time convergence guarantee for all momentum factors β∈[0,1)β\in[0,1) without requiring the aggregated gradient to be unbiased or bounded; the bound reduces to that of Byzantine-resilient stochastic gradient descent at β=0β=0 and is tighter than that of server-side heavy-ball momentum. Experiments on MNIST, CIFAR-10, and Sentiment140 show that Byrd-NAFL converges faster and attains higher accuracy than existing benchmarks in most i.i.d. and non-i.i.d. setups under diverse attacks, while its resilience is bounded by that of the underlying aggregation rule.

Lihan Xu, Xiaoyi Fan, Gang Wang +3

School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an 710049, China. · the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute and Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Joint Laboratory for Emotional Intelligence and Pervasive Computing, Shenzhen MSU-BIT University, Shenzhen 518172, China. · the State Key Laboratory of Autonomous Intelligent Unmanned Systems, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China.

Federated Learning AggregationByzantine-Robust Federated LearningCommunication-Efficient Distributed TrainingGradient DescentFederated Learning
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Nov 1, 2025

Reviving Stale Updates: Data-Free Knowledge Distillation for Asynchronous Federated Learning

Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative model training across distributed clients without sharing raw data, yet its scalability is limited by synchronization overhead. Asynchronous federated learning (AFL) alleviates this issue by allowing clients to communicate independently, thereby improving wall-clock efficiency in large-scale, hardware-heterogeneous environments. However, asynchrony introduces updates computed on outdated global models (staleness) that can destabilize optimization and hinder convergence. We propose FedRevive, an AFL framework that revives stale updates through data-free knowledge distillation (DFKD). FedRevive integrates parameter-space aggregation with a server-side DFKD process that transfers knowledge from stale client updates to the current global model without access to data. A meta-learned generator synthesizes pseudo-samples for multi-teacher distillation. A hybrid aggregation scheme combining raw with DFKD updates effectively mitigates staleness while retaining AFL scalability. Experiments on vision and text benchmarks show that FedRevive achieves faster training by up to 29.7% and higher final accuracy by up to 11.4 percentage points than baselines.

Baris Askin, Holger R. Roth, Zhenyu Sun +3

Carnegie Mellon University · NVIDIA · Northwestern University

Asynchronous Federated LearningFederated Learning Aggregation
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Oct 14, 2025

FedHUG: Federated Heterogeneous Unsupervised Generalization for Remote Physiological Measurements

Remote physiological measurement gained wide attention, while it requires collecting users' privacy-sensitive information, and existing contactless measurements still rely on labeled client data. This presents challenges when we want to further update real-world deployed models with numerous user data lacking labels. To resolve these challenges, we instantiate a new protocol called Federated Unsupervised Domain Generalization (FUDG) in this work. Subsequently, the Federated Heterogeneous Unsupervised Generalization (FedHUG) framework is proposed and consists of: (1) Minimal Bias Aggregation module dynamically adjusts aggregation weights based on prior-driven bias evaluation to cope with heterogeneous non-IID features from multiple domains. (2) The Global Distribution-aware Learning Controller parameterizes the label distribution and dynamically manipulates client-specific training strategies, thereby mitigating the server-client label distribution skew and long-tail issue. The proposal shows superior performance across state-of-the-art techniques in estimation with either RGB video or mmWave radar. The code will be released.

Xiao Yang, Dengbo He, Duoxun Tang +2

Systems Hub, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), Guangzhou, China

Federated Domain GeneralizationFederated LearningFederated Learning AggregationHeterogeneous Federated LearningNon-IID Federated LearningRemote Photoplethysmography
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Sep 17, 2025

FedIA: Importance-Aware Aggregation for Domain-Robust Federated Graph Learning

Federated graph learning (FGL) is a natural paradigm for social-media user graphs, where language communities, regional markets, and service boundaries can prevent raw graph pooling. We use the Twitch Gamers networks as the primary live-streaming social-media benchmark, and study a question that is often hidden by representation-level evaluation: after local message passing, what update signals are actually exposed to server aggregation? Through update-space measurements, we identify an aggregation-level failure in which graph-domain clients gradually place salient update signals on less shared parameter coordinates, while message-passing backbones show weaker cross-domain directional compatibility than an MLP control. This update-support fragmentation means that standard averaging can dilute locally important coordinates even when no raw graph data are exchanged. Across five backbones, homophily remains relevant but is not the dominant correlate of support retention; feature, label, and degree discrepancies show stronger associations. These findings indicate that graph-domain shifts damage not only local representations, but also the coordinate support on which aggregation operates. Motivated by this diagnosis, we propose FedIA, a plug-and-play server-side importance-aware aggregation method. Importance Masking selects a shared high-magnitude coordinate support, and Contribution-Aware Momentum Weighting smooths client contributions within that support. FedIA requires no raw graph sharing, no graph-statistics upload, and no auxiliary communication payload, while adding only O(D+N)O(D+N) persistent server state for DD model coordinates and NN clients.

Zhanting Zhou, Zeyu Ma, Ziqiang Zheng +1

University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, No. 2006, Xiyuan Ave, West Hi-Tech Zone, Chengdu, Sichuan 611731, China

Federated Learning AggregationDomain GeneralizationNon-IID Federated LearningFederated Graph LearningFederated Learning
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Sep 15, 2025

FedDAF: Federated Domain Adaptation Using Model Functional Distance

Federated Domain Adaptation (FDA) improves model performance at a target client by collaborating with source clients while preserving data privacy. FDA faces two key challenges: domain shift between source and target data, and limited labeled data at the target, a common constraint when a new site joins a federation before it has accumulated its own labeled data, as in clinical deployments. Most existing methods address domain shift alone, assuming ample target data; those that also tackle data scarcity still fail to prioritize source information according to the target's specific objective. We propose FedDAF, which addresses both challenges through similarity-based aggregation of the global source and target models, using their model functional distance, computed from the angle between their mean gradient fields on target data and normalized via a Gompertz function. The global source model itself is formed using a distance-based weighted average, giving greater weight to source models closer to the target model. Experiments on real-world datasets show FedDAF outperforms existing federated learning (FL), personalized FL, and FDA methods in test accuracy.

Mrinmay Sen, Sidhant Nair, C Krishna Mohan

Department of Artificial Intelligence, Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad, Hyderabad, 502285, Telangana, India. · Department of Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, New Delhi, 110016, Delhi, India.

Federated Learning AggregationDomain AdaptationModel MergingFederated Learning
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Aug 16, 2025

FedUHD: Unsupervised Federated Learning using In-Memory Hyperdimensional Computing

Unsupervised federated learning (UFL) enables privacy-preserving distributed training without data labeling, yet practical deployment remains challenging due to non-IID data, high computational and communication costs at edge devices, and sensitivity to communication noise. We propose FedUHD, the first UFL framework based on Hyperdimensional Computing (HDC). On the client side, FedUHD employs kNN-based cluster hypervector removal to mitigate non-IID effects by filtering detrimental local outliers. On the server side, cluster-aware HDC aggregation leverages cluster-level statistics to stabilize learning across heterogeneous clients. To further improve efficiency, we design a compute-in-memory (CIM) accelerator based on a novel phase-change memory (PCM) device, integrated with lightweight ASIC digital modules to execute the client-side HDC pipeline within the accelerator. The intrinsic robustness of HDC to low precision and device variations enables efficient mapping onto analog PCM crossbars, exploiting massive parallelism while minimizing data movement. Experimental results show that FedUHD achieves comparable accuracy to state-of-the-art neural network-based UFL methods across all datasets. On HAR and CIFAR10/100, FedUHD delivers an average 2,239x speedup and 1,542x higher energy efficiency on GPU. In addition, FedUHD reduces communication cost by up to 176x on HAR and CIFAR10/100 and demonstrates greater robustness than Orchestra under communication noise. Compared to GPU implementation of FedUHD, the proposed PCM-based accelerator provides an additional 4.07x speedup and three orders of magnitude higher energy efficiency on average. Furthermore, the results demonstrate the benefit of PCM over RRAM as a CIM substrate.

You Hak Lee, Keming Fan, Xiaofan Yu +4

University of California San Diego, USA

Compute-in-MemoryFederated Learning AggregationCommunication-Efficient Distributed TrainingNon-IID Federated LearningHyperdimensional ComputingFederated Learning+1
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May 28, 2025

Inclusive Federated Learning Through Compliance-Weighted Noise Allocation in Healthcare AI

Background: Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative training of clinical AI models without centralizing patient data, but adoption is limited by privacy concerns, heterogeneous institutional compliance, and resource disparities; standard differential privacy (DP) applies uniform noise to all clients, penalizing well-compliant or under-resourced institutions. Objective: We introduce a compliance-aware FL framework that adapts DP to institutional compliance, letting lower-compliance sites participate without uniformly penalizing others. Methods: A compliance scoring tool aligned with HIPAA, GDPR, NIST, ISO, and HL7/FHIR maps each client score to a per-step Gaussian noise scale for server-side DP-SGD on a small aggregator dataset. The formal (ε,δ)(ε,δ) bound applies to the aggregator dataset under a semi-honest aggregator; client-level DP needs secure aggregation (future work). We evaluate five FL strategies on PneumoniaMNIST and BreastMNIST (16 clients, 50 rounds, five seeds); the cumulative aggregator-dataset εε is about 1434 (Breast) and 513 (Pneumonia) at δ=10−5δ=10^{-5}. Results: Including 12 lower-compliance clients (Experiment 1) versus a compliant-only baseline (Experiment 4) changed BreastMNIST accuracy by +4.5 (FedAvg), +6.8 (FedMedian), +5.2 (FedProx), +1.6 (FedYogi), and -4.1 (FedAdam) percentage points (pooled +2.8 pp; not significant at n=5; up to +17 pp per configuration); compliance-weighted allocation matched uniform server-side DP at equal mean noise (+0.1 pp), carrying no utility penalty, and first-round noise cost 1.3 pp (Breast) and 2.5 pp (Pneumonia, FedAvg). Conclusions: Compliance-weighted server-side DP lets lower-compliance institutions join FL without degrading performance, giving auditable per-site noise control at no utility cost; formal guarantees apply to the aggregator dataset, with client-level DP requiring secure aggregation.

Santhosh Parampottupadam, Melih Coşğun, Sarthak Pati +7

German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), Division of Medical Image Computing, Heidelberg, Germany · Department of Computer Engineering, Bilkent University, Universiteler 06800 Çankaya/Ankara, Türkiye · Medical Research Group, MLCommons, San Francisco, CA, USA +2

Federated Learning AggregationDifferentially Private Stochastic Gradient DescentHealthcarePrivacy-Preserving MLDifferentially Private Federated LearningFederated Learning+1
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May 26, 2025

Federated Independent Component Analysis via Spectral Alignment and Robust Aggregation

This paper studies robust estimation for Independent Component Analysis (ICA) in the federated learning setting, where data are locally distributed across clients and may exhibit substantial heterogeneity. The goal is to recover a common global mixing matrix by aggregating local estimators computed by individual clients. The main difficulty is that local ICA estimators are identifiable only up to sign flips and column permutations and may have highly heterogeneous estimation quality. We propose a novel three-step aggregation method that first aligns the permutations across all local estimators via a particular spectral clustering approach, then aligns the signs within each estimated cluster via another tailored spectral approach, and finally applies the geometric median for robust aggregation. The proposed estimator is shown to remain accurate even when a substantial fraction of local estimators are of low quality or inconsistent, as long as each cluster contains a majority of accurate estimators. This contrasts with its analogue based on simple averaging, whose performance is determined by the worst local estimator. In the homogeneous setting, the robust estimator is also shown to be minimax optimal, up to a logarithmic factor, both when the number of clients remains fixed and when it diverges. The theoretical findings are corroborated by simulation studies and a real-data analysis.

Xin Bing, Dian Jin, Yuqian Zhang

University of Toronto · National University of Singapore · Rutgers University

Federated Learning AggregationIndependent Component AnalysisByzantine-Robust Federated LearningFederated LearningHeterogeneous Federated Learning
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Mar 19, 2025

Asynchronous Federated Continual Segmentation with Evolving Clients and Label Spaces

Federated learning seeks to foster collaboration among distributed clients while preserving the privacy of their local data. Traditional federated learning methods typically assume a fixed setting, where participating clients, client data, and learning objectives remain unchanged. However, in real-world scenarios, a federation may evolve over time, with changes in both its client composition and target label space. In this evolving federated setting, conventional round-wise model aggregation becomes inflexible, as each federation update requires repeated communication, repeated local computation, and synchronized participation from all accumulated clients. To address this limitation, we propose CA-MMDS, a continual multiple-model distillation framework for federated continual segmentation with asynchronous clients and evolving label spaces. Instead of repeatedly aggregating model parameters from all clients, CA-MMDS maintains a server-side archive of client models and updates the global model through proxy-based distillation from multiple archived local models. When new clients join or existing clients evolve, only the newly added or updated local models need to be uploaded, while unchanged clients can remain offline and continue to contribute through their archived models. This design substantially reduces communication and computation costs while enabling flexible asynchronous cooperation among evolving clients. Using multi-class 3D abdominal CT segmentation as an application task, we demonstrate that CA-MMDS efficiently incorporates evolving client knowledge while achieving competitive segmentation performance.

Can Peng, Qianhui Men, Pramit Saha +5

University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom · University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom

Federated Learning AggregationFederated Continual LearningAsynchronous Federated LearningMedical Image SegmentationSemantic SegmentationFederated Learning
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Feb 28, 2025

Approaching the Harm of Gradient Attacks While Only Flipping Labels

Machine learning systems deployed in distributed or federated environments are highly susceptible to adversarial manipulations, particularly availability attacks -- rendering the trained model unavailable. Prior research in distributed ML has demonstrated such adversarial effects through the injection of gradients or data poisoning. In this work, we ask whether comparable degradation is still possible under a substantially more constrained action space: the adversary may only flip a limited number of labels of existing training examples, without modifying features, injecting samples, or directly controlling gradients. We analyze the extent of damage caused by constrained label flipping attacks against distributed learning under mean aggregation -- the dominant baseline in research and production. Focusing on classification problems, (1) we propose a novel formalization of label flipping attacks as a per-round constrained optimization problem, derive a greedy label-selection rule for logistic regression, and empirically evaluate it beyond its derivation setting, including on MLPs and robust aggregators. The rule is provably per-epoch optimal for the attacker under the mean aggregator. (2) Empirically, we show that optimized label flipping can cause substantial accuracy degradation while outperforming random label flipping under similar budgets. (3) We shed light on an interesting interplay between what the attacker gains from more write-access versus what they gain from more flipping budget. (4) Finally, although the attack is derived for mean aggregation, we find that it can transfer empirically to the coordinate-wise median and trimmed mean aggregators, where its effectiveness approaches that of the Little-is-Enough gradient attack. This demonstrates that even highly constrained label-flipping adversaries can pose a significant availability threat to distributed learning.

Abdessamad El-Kabid, El-Mahdi El-Mhamdi

École Polytechnique

Federated Learning AggregationAdversarial AttacksDistributed TrainingData Poisoning Attacks
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Oct 4, 2024

Influence-Oriented Personalized Federated Learning

Federated learning (FL) is a machine learning paradigm where clients with different behaviors and preferences can learn collaboratively without compromising data privacy. Typical FL methods often rely on fixed weighting for parameter aggregation, thereby neglecting the mutual influence among clients. In practice, clients with similar preferences or backgrounds may provide more useful knowledge to each other, which can be leveraged to improve local performance. However, how to quantify such cross-client influence and how to exploit it for personalized aggregation remain underexplored. To address this gap, we propose an influence-oriented Federated learning framework which quantitatively measures Client-level and Class-level Influence to realize adaptive parameter aggregation for each client (FedC^2I for short). Our core idea is to explicitly model the inter-client influence within an FL system via the well-crafted influence vector and influence matrix. Specifically, FedC^2I incorporate influence vectors to quantify client-level influence, enables clients to selectively acquire knowledge from others, and guides the aggregation of feature representation layers. Meanwhile, the influence matrix captures class-level influence in a more fine-grained manner to achieve personalized classifier aggregation. We evaluate the performance of FedC^2I against existing federated learning methods under non-IID settings, and the results demonstrate the superiority of our method in terms of effectiveness, robustness, and interpretability.

Yue Tan, Guodong Long, Jing Jiang +1

Griffith University · University of Technology Sydney · Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Federated Learning AggregationNon-IID Federated LearningInfluence FunctionsFederated Learning
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Sep 26, 2024

Byzantine-Robust Aggregation for Securing Decentralized Federated Learning

Federated Learning (FL) emerges as a distributed machine learning approach that addresses privacy concerns by training AI models locally on devices. Decentralized Federated Learning (DFL) extends the FL paradigm by eliminating the central server, thereby enhancing scalability and robustness through the avoidance of a single point of failure. However, DFL faces significant challenges in optimizing security, as most Byzantine-robust algorithms proposed in the literature are designed for centralized scenarios. In this paper, we present a novel Byzantine-robust aggregation algorithm to enhance the security of Decentralized Federated Learning environments, coined WFAgg. This proposal handles adverse conditions and strengthens the robustness of dynamic decentralized topologies at the same time by employing multiple filters to identify and mitigate Byzantine attacks. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in maintaining model accuracy and convergence in the presence of various Byzantine attack scenarios, outperforming state-of-the-art centralized Byzantine-robust aggregation schemes (such as Multi-Krum or Clustering). These algorithms are evaluated on an IID image classification problem in both centralized and decentralized scenarios.

Diego Cajaraville-Aboy, Ana Fernández-Vilas, Rebeca P. Díaz-Redondo +1

atlanTTic Research Center – ICLAB – Universidade de Vigo, Vigo, 36310, Spain

Federated Learning AggregationByzantine-Robust Federated LearningDecentralized Learning
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Feb 26, 2024

FedReview: Review and Dispose Poisoned Updates without Validation Datasets or Historic Knowledge

Federated learning has emerged as a decentralized approach for training high-performance models without accessing user data. Despite its effectiveness, it is vulnerable to poisoning attacks, where malicious users manipulate the global model by uploading poisoned updates. In this paper, we propose FedReview, a review-based mechanism to identify and dispose the potential poisoned updates in federated learning. Under FedReview, the server randomly assigns a subset of clients as reviewers to evaluate model updates on their training datasets in each round. The reviewers rank the updates based on evaluation results and estimate the number of low-quality updates as potential poisoned ones. Based on the review reports, the server applies a majority voting mechanism to aggregate rankings, which tolerates wrong rankings from malicious reviewers and guides the removal of suspicious updates during model aggregation. In contrast to prior works such as FLTrust, FedReview does not require a server-side validation dataset or prior knowledge of clients, allowing flexible client participation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FedReview enables the server to learn a well-performing global model in adversarial environments.

Tianhang Zheng, Yanlu Li, Bohan Deng +1

University of Missouri-Kansas City · University of Toronto

Federated Learning AggregationByzantine-Robust Federated LearningFederated Learning
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Jun 22, 2023

Reinforcement Federated Learning Method Based on Adaptive OPTICS Clustering

Federated learning is a distributed machine learning technology, which realizes the balance between data privacy protection and data sharing computing. To protect data privacy, feder-ated learning learns shared models by locally executing distributed training on participating devices and aggregating local models into global models. There is a problem in federated learning, that is, the negative impact caused by the non-independent and identical distribu-tion of data across different user terminals. In order to alleviate this problem, this paper pro-poses a strengthened federation aggregation method based on adaptive OPTICS clustering. Specifically, this method perceives the clustering environment as a Markov decision process, and models the adjustment process of parameter search direction, so as to find the best clus-tering parameters to achieve the best federated aggregation method. The core contribution of this paper is to propose an adaptive OPTICS clustering algorithm for federated learning. The algorithm combines OPTICS clustering and adaptive learning technology, and can effective-ly deal with the problem of non-independent and identically distributed data across different user terminals. By perceiving the clustering environment as a Markov decision process, the goal is to find the best parameters of the OPTICS cluster without artificial assistance, so as to obtain the best federated aggregation method and achieve better performance. The reliability and practicability of this method have been verified on the experimental data, and its effec-tiveness and superiority have been proved.

Tianyu Zhao, Junping Du, Yingxia Shao +1

Beijing Key Laboratory of Intelligent Communication Software and Multimedia, School of Computer Science (National Pilot Software Engineering School), Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, China

Federated Learning AggregationClusteringUnsupervised ClusteringNon-IID Federated LearningClustered Federated Learning
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