The paper introduces Fed-ADR, a coordinated attack framework where a malicious orchestrator server directs heterogeneous adversarial clients to adapt their gradient updates in real time, thereby evading existing federated learning defenses and drastically reducing global model accuracy. It also presents a lightweight detection mechanism that estimates true client gradients from historical data to spot coordinated attacks, and an in-situ recovery method that restores model performance without restarting training. Experiments on MNIST, Fashion‑MNIST, and CIFAR‑10 show the attack can drop accuracy from over 90% to below 10%, while the defense can recover accuracy to above 90% within a few rounds at a computational cost at least 20× lower than retraining from scratch.
By Mohamed Shaaban, Ahmed Abdelnaby, Mohamed Elmahallawy
arXiv:2607. 07314v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Federated learning (FL) avoids explicit data exposure by keeping raw data on local clients, yet privacy risks remain in the training process and the learned model itself.
By Chongkai Li, Bang Zhang, Wenjian Luo
arXiv:2601.00900v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: As a critical application of computational intelligence in remote sensing, deep learning-based synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image target re...
By Yuchao Hou (Shanxi Normal University, Taiyuan, China), Zixuan Zhang (Shanxi Normal University, Taiyuan, China), Jie Wang (Shanxi Normal University, Taiyuan, China), Wenke Huang (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore), Lianhui Liang (Guangxi University, Nanning, China), Di Wu (La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia), Zhiquan Liu (Jinan University, Guangzhou, China), Youliang Tian (Guizhou University, Guiyang, China), Jianming Zhu (Central University of Finance and Economics, Beijing, China), Jisheng Dang (Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, China), Junhao Dong (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore), Zhongliang Guo (University of St Andrews, St Andrews, United Kingdom)
The paper introduces FedMAST, a Federated Multi‑Axis Structural Tracing defense designed to detect and contain backdoor attacks in federated learning. FedMAST evaluates client updates through complementary structural, spectral, and historical evidence, applying tiered filtering and round‑level containment. In experiments across six backdoor attacks, FedMAST consistently achieves lower attack success rates while preserving high main‑task accuracy.
By Srinivasan Subramanian, Kazi Aminul Islam, Md. Abdullah Al Hafiz Khan
The paper investigates whether federated learning harms the faithfulness of Grad‑CAM explanations in deepfake detection. Using an EfficientNet‑B4 model on FaceForensics++ data distributed across five clients, the study finds that explanation quality is non‑monotonic: near‑IID and moderate heterogeneity yield explanations as good as or better than a centralized model, while extreme heterogeneity causes explanations to become spatially incoherent and causally misleading. The authors provide practical guidance for determining when federated deepfake detection can be safely deployed and when its explanations lose trustworthiness.
By Muhammad Uzair Shahid, Muhammad Zabil Mehboob
FedLNS is a server‑side framework that screens federated learning updates by representing each client’s contribution through changes in trainable normalization‑layer parameters, creating lightweight signatures that can be compared against a history‑aware cross‑client reference. The method requires no extra client‑to‑server communication, raw data, or labeled attack examples, and after screening, the remaining full‑model updates are aggregated with standard federated learning rules. Experiments on GPT‑style, BERT‑style, and LLaMA‑style models with 200 clients demonstrate that FedLNS achieves lower test perplexity than six baselines even when 40% of the population performs target manipulation under both IID and non‑IID data partitions.
By Kai Li, Jong-Ik Park, Carlee Joe-Wong, Wei Ni, Falko Dressler
Federated learning (FL) avoids explicit data exposure by keeping raw data on local clients, yet privacy risks remain in the training process and the learned model itself. Recently, centralized Taking Away Training Data (TATD) attacks have shown that malicious training could abuse the memorization capacity of deep models to store and later recover training data.
arXiv:2609.07147v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Federated learning, as a privacy-preserving distributed machine learning paradigm, faces significant threats from backdoor attacks. Compared to central...
By Jian Wang, Hong Shen, Wei Ke, Xue Hua Liu
The paper introduces STAIN-FL, a stealthy backdoor attack framework for federated video anomaly detection that uses natural surveillance conditions—such as low light, indoor settings, and crowd density—as contextual triggers. STAIN-FL manipulates anomaly labels and masks gradients to keep clean accuracy low while inducing trigger‑conditioned misclassification. Experiments on UCF‑Crime with I3D features show that sparse attacks remain undetectable, drop clean accuracy by less than 2%, yet achieve over 50% backdoor accuracy for hundreds of rounds under FedAvg and FedProx.
By Ashlinder Kaur, Purnima Murali Mohan, Zengxiang Li, Tram Truong-Huu
arXiv:2604. 04611v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Federated learning (FL) enables multiple clients to collaboratively train a global model by aggregating local updates without sharing private data.
By Motoki Nakamura
arXiv:2608. 07274v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Split Federated Learning (SFL) facilitates privacy-preserving collaborative training with reduced client-side overhead.
By Yuhan Xie, Jingrong Huang, Chen Lyu
FedNIA is a defense framework for federated learning that identifies and excludes malicious clients without needing a central test dataset. It works by injecting random noise inputs and analyzing layerwise activation patterns with an autoencoder to detect abnormal behaviors caused by data poisoning. The method can counter various attack types—including sample poisoning, label flipping, and backdoors—even when multiple attackers collaborate, and shows strong performance on non‑iid federated datasets.
By Ehsan Hallaji, Roozbeh Razavi-Far, Mehrdad Saif