The paper introduces DP‑BR‑FedAvg, a federated learning framework that combines Gaussian‑mechanism differential privacy with a coordinate‑wise trimmed‑mean Byzantine‑robust aggregation rule. It is evaluated on a simulated cross‑institutional classification task for fraud and clinical‑risk scoring, showing that plain FedAvg fails when a quarter of twenty clients are Byzantine, while DP‑BR‑FedAvg recovers more signal and bounds privacy loss. The study demonstrates that privacy and robustness interact, and system design for regulated, adversarial, cross‑institutional settings must account for this interaction.
arXiv:2502. 17748v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) inherently mitigates mass data centralization risks; however, its privacy protections are not equally distributed - leaving vulnerable individuals disproportionately exposed to sophisticated privacy attacks.
By Tianyu Zhao, Mahmoud Srewa, Salma Elmalaki
Aegis is a client‑side defense for medical federated learning that protects against model inversion attacks by adding a masking gradient derived from locally synthesized data. The method exploits the fact that attacks fail when the effective batch size exceeds the model’s leakage capacity, turning this bottleneck into a privacy guarantee. Experiments on MNIST, CIFAR‑10, and MedMNIST datasets show that Aegis neutralizes state‑of‑the‑art attacks while preserving model accuracy and adding only modest overhead.
By Chaoyu Zhang, Shanghao Shi, Heng Jin, Ning Wang, Y. Thomas Hou, Wenjing Lou
Heterogeneous Differential Privacy (HDP) in Federated Learning (FL) allows clients to select individual privacy budgets ($\varepsilon_i$) according to institutional policies and data sensitivity. In practice, many HDP-FL systems employ $\varepsilon$-aware server aggregation to improve model utility by re-weighting client updates according to their declared privacy budgets.
arXiv:2610.20264v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Client-level fair federated learning, in the form of $q$-fair federated learning ($q$-FFL), agnostic federated learning, or tilted empirical risk minim...
By Tiantong Sun, Jinlin Liu, Xingru Wei, Zequan Fang, Wei Chen, Qiang Yang, Xiaojin Zhang
The paper investigates how privacy guarantees, robustness to Byzantine attacks, and detection coverage for rare intrusion types interact in federated network intrusion detection systems. It introduces geometric indistinguishability to explain how privacy noise can obscure minority-class signals, and demonstrates through experiments on UNSW‑NB15 that combining differential privacy with robust aggregation can disproportionately harm detection of rare attacks. The study highlights that these properties cannot be treated as independently composable and calls for aggregation‑aware modeling and sample‑aware evaluation to build trustworthy federated NIDS.
By Adrita Rahman Tory, ABM Shawkat Ali, Md Abu Layek, Khondokar Fida Hasan