ProtoHAR: Prototype Guided Personalized Federated Learning for Human Activity Recognition.

Recently, deep learning, which are able to extract automatically features from data, has achieved state-of-the-art performance across a variety of sensor based human activity recognition (HAR) tasks. However, the existing deep neural networks are usually trained with a global loss, and all hidden layer weights have to be always kept in memory before the forward and backward pass has completed. The backward locking phenomenon prevents the reuse of memory, which is a crucial limitation for wearable activity recognition. In the paper, we proposed a layer-wise convolutional neural networks (CNN) with local loss for the use of HAR task. To our knowledge, this paper is the first that uses local loss based CNN for HAR in ubiquitous and wearable computing arena. We performed experiments on five public HAR datasets including UCI HAR dataset, OPPOTUNITY dataset, UniMib-SHAR dataset, PAMAP dataset, and WISDM dataset. The results show that local loss works better than global loss for tested baseline architectures. At no extra cost, the local loss can approach the state-of-the-arts on a variety of HAR datasets, even though the number of parameters was smaller. We believe that the layer-wise CNN with local loss can be used to update the existing deep HAR methods.

One of the major open problems in sensor-based Human Activity Recognition (HAR) is the scarcity of labeled data. Among the many solutions to address this challenge, semi-supervised learning approaches represent a promising direction. However, their centralized architecture incurs in the scalability and privacy problems that arise when the process involves a large number of users. Federated learning (FL) is a promising paradigm to address these problems. However, the FL methods that have been proposed for HAR assume that the participating users can always obtain labels to train their local models (i.e., they assume a fully supervised setting). In this work, we propose FedAR: a novel hybrid method for HAR that combines semi-supervised and federated learning to take advantage of the strengths of both approaches. FedAR combines active learning and label propagation to semi-automatically annotate the local streams of unlabeled sensor data, and it relies on FL to build a global activity model in a scalable and privacy-aware fashion. FedAR also includes a transfer learning strategy to fine-tune the global model on each user. We evaluated our method on two public datasets, showing that FedAR reaches recognition rates and personalization capabilities similar to state-of-the-art FL supervised approaches. As a major advantage, FedAR only requires a very limited number of annotated data to populate a pre-trained model and a small number of active learning questions that quickly decrease while using the system, leading to an effective and scalable solution for the data scarcity problem of HAR.

Edge servers and mobile devices are often assigned a large number of computing tasks. However, the data involved in computing tasks is often sensitive in terms of privacy. Our initial proposal is a federated edge learning strategy based on real-world scenarios, which combines blurred data or pseudo shared data. Federated learning is used to train device models with the aim of protecting privacy while enabling mobile devices to more effectively utilize data for decision-making. In the case of limited energy on mobile devices, we propose a federated edge learning algorithm with blurred data sharing. This algorithm can generate more accurate models by uploading partially blurred data. In order to further improve model accuracy and protect privacy of mobile devices, we propose a federated edge learning algorithm with pseudo data sharing based on dataset distillation and generative adversarial networks (GANs) in scenarios with relatively sufficient energy. The experimental results on several traditional datasets show that our proposed algorithms outperform traditional algorithms in terms of accuracy and energy consumption.

Learning underlying patterns from sensory data is crucial in the Human Activity Recognition (HAR) task to avoid poor generalization when coping with unseen data. A key solution to such an issue is representation learning, which becomes essential when input signals contain activities with similar patterns or when patterns generated by different subjects for the same activity vary. To address these issues, we seek a solution to increase generalization by learning the underlying factors of each sensor signal. We develop a novel multi-channel asymmetric auto-encoder to recreate input signals precisely and extract indicative unsupervised futures. Further, we investigate the role of various activation functions in signal reconstruction to ensure the model preserves the patterns of each activity in the output. Our main contribution is that we propose a multi-task learning model to enhance representation learning through shared layers between signal reconstruction and the HAR task to improve the robustness of the model in coping with users not included in the training phase. The proposed model learns shared features between different tasks that are indeed the underlying factors of each input signal. We validate our multi-task learning model using several publicly available HAR datasets, UCI-HAR, MHealth, PAMAP2, and USC-HAD, and an in-house alpine skiing dataset collected in the wild, where our model achieved 99%, 99%, 95%, 88%, and 92% accuracy. Our proposed method shows consistent performance and good generalization on all the datasets compared to the state of the art.

The convergence of vehicular technology, artificial intelligence (AI), and distributed computing has catalyzed the emergence of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) as a cornerstone of next-generation intelligent transportation systems (ITS). By enabling vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication, IoV supports cooperative perception, real-time decision-making, and autonomous driving. However, the reliance on large-scale, data-driven intelligence in IoV exposes systems to critical challenges, including adversarial poisoning, privacy leakage, identity forgery, and the fragility of centralized learning architectures. Federated Learning (FL) has been proposed as a promising paradigm to alleviate some of these issues by enabling distributed model training without centralizing sensitive vehicular data. Nonetheless, conventional FL remains vulnerable to security and trust limitations, particularly in dynamic vehicular environments. This thesis addresses these challenges by designing secure, privacy-preserving, and scalable FL frameworks that leverage distributed ledger technologies and cutting-edge security mechanisms.The thesis advances knowledge through four interconnected contributions. First, two novel optimization-driven poisoning attack models are introduced: PA-PSOSA and PAPSOGA, which combine particle swarm optimization with simulated annealing and genetic algorithms, respectively. These models demonstrate that even a small poisoning budget can substantially degrade global model utility under black-box and clean-label constraints, highlighting the urgency of robust defenses in vehicular FL. Second, a permissioned blockchain-enabled FL (BCFL) framework is proposed, in which consortium edge nodes running Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) consensus replace the central aggregator. With blockchain integration and data validation mechanisms, this design ensures identity authentication, verifiable audit trails, and improved resilience against poisoning and Sybil attacks, while maintaining high model accuracy under adversarial conditions. Third, the framework is further enhanced to achieve inference-resistance by integrating secure aggregation (SecAgg) and differential privacy (DP), and lightweight with off-chain commitments. This design significantly reduces ledger storage requirements, increases system throughput, and mitigates inference-based privacy risks. Finally, to overcome the scalability limitations of PBFT-based BCFL, a DAG-enabled FL (DFL) framework is developed. By leveraging parallel validation, utility-score-based tip selection, and reputation-weighted aggregation, this framework significantly improves scalability, reduces communication complexity, and enhances robustness in asynchronous vehicular environments.Together, these contributions articulate a coherent progression from exposing vulnerabilities in vehicular FL to constructing secure, privacy-preserving, and scalable frameworks tailored for IoV ecosystems. The findings demonstrate that interdisciplinary integration of optimization theory, cryptography, differential privacy, and distributed ledger technologies is indispensable for trustworthy vehicular intelligence. Beyond theoretical significance, the proposed frameworks offer practical designs for deployment in safety-critical IoV environments. Future research directions include the integration of zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP) for verifiable privacy, adaptive defenses against evolving adversarial strategies, and experimental validation in real-world vehicular testbeds. Collectively, this thesis establishes a foundation for secure federated intelligence in IoV, contributing to the reliability, efficiency, and trustworthiness of next-generation ITS.

In modern devices, such as smartphones and IoT, AI hardware implements different ML models to train massive amounts of data for various applications. However, based on the sensitivity of this data, privacy and security concerns, or both, may restrict users from accessing the data storage to conduct the ML training using conventional methods. Federated learning (FL) is consequently emerged to maintain training data distribution among smart mobile devices while aggregating locally processed updates. In addition to improving the model training performance as the number of clients rises, FL also creates a privacy-preserved shared data model. FL execution, however, can be time-consuming. This study proposes a parallelized approach to enhance the performance and privacy of the FL algorithm (FedAvg). In this regard, the FedAvg algorithm is expanded to our proposed model, distributed FedAvg (D-FedAvg), which enables several clients to collaborate concurrently and train a single learning model. To evaluate the performance of the proposed model, we investigated the impact of various numbers of clients and training rounds on the result. To validate our findings, we conducted extensive experiments using MNIST datasets trained using two federated learning models, MLP and CNN. The results show our D-FedAvg can maintain data privacy and dramatically enhance the execution time of FL compared to traditional FedAvg. According to the study, the FL framework's time complexity increases as the number of clients and rounds increases, but parallelization allows it to operate 2–3 times faster than usual.

Federated learning (FL) offers an effective learning architecture to protect data privacy in a distributed manner. However, the inevitable network asynchrony, overdependence on a central coordinator, and lack of an open and fair incentive mechanism collectively hinder FL's further development. We propose IronForge, a new generation of FL framework, that features a directed acyclic graph (DAG)-based structure, where nodes represent uploaded models, and referencing relationships between models form the DAG that guides the aggregation process. This design eliminates the need for central coordinators to achieve fully decentralized operations. IronForge runs in a public and open network and launches a fair incentive mechanism by enabling state consistency in the DAG. Hence, the system fits in networks where training resources are unevenly distributed. In addition, dedicated defense strategies against prevalent FL attacks on incentive fairness and data privacy are presented to ensure the security of IronForge. Experimental results based on a newly developed test bed FLSim highlight the superiority of IronForge to the existing prevalent FL frameworks under various specifications in performance, fairness, and security. To the best of our knowledge, IronForge is the first secure and fully decentralized FL (DFL) framework that can be applied in open networks with realistic network and training settings.

Federated learning (FL), which enables multiple distributed devices (clients) to collaboratively train a global model without transmitting their private data, has attracted much attention in the Internet of Things (IoT) domain. Compared with centralized learning, FL has obvious privacy advantages because it can protect the clients’ raw data from direct access by adversaries. Furthermore, to prevent the adversaries from inferring private information from the transmitted parameters, several FL algorithms based on differential privacy (DP) have been proposed, where the clients add artificial noise to their local parameters for privacy protection. Nevertheless, the added noise would disrupt the learning process and degrade the performance of the trained model. Considering this, in this article, we develop a performance-enhanced DP-based FL (PEDPFL) algorithm, where a classifier-perturbation regularization method is proposed to improve the robustness of the trained model against DP-injected noise. We derive the theoretical privacy and convergence analysis of the proposed algorithm, and also demonstrate the influence of some hyperparameters on the convergence performance. Simulation results on real-world data sets show that the proposed algorithm has better classification performance than the existing DP-based FL algorithms at the same level of privacy protection, and thus, it is more applicable to IoT applications.

Federated learning is a type of distributed machine learning that focuses on solutions for the properties of training data on edge devices as well as the privacy of the training set. Federated learning is a discipline highly relevant to real-world applications, and thus the emphasis on different perspectives requires an adaptation of the federated learning framework. Although almost every newly proposed federated learning algorithm is compared with some existing algorithms, current research on testing comparisons between commonly used federated learning algorithms remains vague and complex. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to test and compare several federated learning frameworks, including the representative FedAvg, MOON, FedProx, and MOON. Based on revisiting the theory and key steps of these algorithms, an analysis of the performance performance will be conducted, evaluating their advantages for applications. Furthermore, a summary based on the test results will be provided, pointing out possible future challenges as well as research directions.

In this paper, the convergence time of federated learning (FL), when deployed over a realistic wireless network, is studied. In particular, a wireless network is considered in which wireless users transmit their local FL models (trained using their locally collected data) to a base station (BS). The BS, acting as a central controller, generates a global FL model using the received local FL models and broadcasts it back to all users. Due to the limited number of resource blocks (RBs) in a wireless network, only a subset of users can be selected to transmit their local FL model parameters to the BS at each learning step. Moreover, since each user has unique training data samples, the BS prefers to include all local user FL models to generate a converged global FL model. Hence, the FL training loss and convergence time will be significantly affected by the user selection scheme. Therefore, it is necessary to design an appropriate user selection scheme that can select the users who can contribute toward improving the FL convergence speed more frequently. This joint learning, wireless resource allocation, and user selection problem is formulated as an optimization problem whose goal is to minimize the FL convergence time and the FL training loss. To solve this problem, a probabilistic user selection scheme is proposed such that the BS is connected to the users whose local FL models have significant effects on the global FL model with high probabilities. Given the user selection policy, the uplink RB allocation can be determined. To further reduce the FL convergence time, artificial neural networks (ANNs) are used to estimate the local FL models of the users that are not allocated any RBs for local FL model transmission at each given learning step, which enables the BS to improve the global model, the FL convergence speed, and the training loss. Simulation results show that the proposed approach can reduce the FL convergence time by up to 56% and improve the accuracy of identifying handwritten digits by up to 3%, compared to a standard FL algorithm.

<abstract><p>Federated learning (FL) has attracted a lot of interests as a promising machine learning approach to protect user privacy and data security. It requires the clients to send model parameters to the server rather than private datasets, thus protecting privacy to a significant extent. However, there are several types of heterogeneities (data, model, objective and systems) in FL scenario, posing distinct challenges to the canonical FL algorithm (FedAvg). In this work, we propose a novel FL framework that integrates knowledge distillation and Bayesian inference to address this multi-dimensional heterogeneity problem. On the client side, we approximate the local likelihood function using a scaled multi-dimensional Gaussian probability density function (PDF). Moreover, each client is allowed to design customized model according to the requirement through knowledge distillation. On the server side, a multi-Gaussian product mechanism is employed to construct and maximize the global likelihood function, greatly enhancing the accuracy of the aggregated model in the case of data heterogeneity. Finally, we show in extensive empirical experiments on various datasets and settings that global model and local model can achieve better performance and require fewer communication rounds to converge compared with other FL techniques.</p></abstract>

Human Activity Recognition (HAR) using built‐in sensors in wearable devices offers valuable insights for continuous behaviour monitoring and health assessment. However, existing HAR approaches face several key challenges: (1) limited capacity to capture multi‐scale temporal dependencies; (2) difficulty in recognising low‐motion or static activities when relying solely on inertial sensors such as 3D accelerometers (3D‐ACC); and (3) insufficient utilisation of auxiliary physiological signals in conventional single‐task learning frameworks. To address these limitations, we propose a Hierarchical‐Split Multi‐Scale Convolutional Network with Multi‐Task Learning for wearable HAR. The proposed model integrates a hierarchical‐split convolutional block to efficiently extract both local and global temporal features. It further employs a channel‐wise attention mechanism to adaptively fuse photoplethysmography (PPG) and 3D‐ACC signals, enabling the model to capture complementary physiological dynamics and improve the recognition of subtle or low‐motion activities. In addition, we introduce a multi‐task learning framework with an auxiliary heart rate estimation task, which enhances physiological representation learning without requiring additional annotations, thereby improving model robustness and generalisability. Extensive experiments on two public HAR datasets demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms existing approaches under both overall and cross‐subject evaluation protocols, highlighting its effectiveness in realistic, user‐independent settings.

Federated learning (FL) is a distributed deep learning method that enables multiple participants, such as mobile and IoT devices, to contribute a neural network while their private training data remains in local devices. This distributed approach is promising in the mobile systems where have a large corpus of decentralized data and require high privacy. However, unlike the common datasets, the data distribution of the mobile systems is imbalanced which will increase the bias of model. In this article, we demonstrate that the imbalanced distributed training data will cause an accuracy degradation of FL applications. To counter this problem, we build a self-balancing FL framework named Astraea, which alleviates the imbalances by 1) Z-score-based data augmentation, and 2) Mediator-based multi-client rescheduling. The proposed framework relieves global imbalance by adaptive data augmentation and downsampling, and for averaging the local imbalance, it creates the mediator to reschedule the training of clients based on Kullback-Leibler divergence (KLD) of their data distribution. Compared with FedAvg, the vanilla FL algorithm, Astraea shows +4.39 and +6.51 percent improvement of top-1 accuracy on the imbalanced EMNIST and imbalanced CINIC-10 datasets, respectively. Meanwhile, the communication traffic of Astraea is reduced by 75 percent compared to FedAvg.

The federated learning (FL) paradigm is well-suited for the field of medical image analysis, as it can effectively cope with machine learning on isolated multi-center data while protecting the privacy of participating parties. However, current research on optimization algorithms in FL often focuses on limited datasets and scenarios, primarily centered around natural images, with insufficient comparative experiments in medical contexts. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of several state-of-the-art FL algorithms in the context of medical imaging. We conduct a fair comparison of classification models trained using various FL algorithms across multiple medical imaging datasets. Additionally, we evaluate system performance metrics, such as communication cost and computational efficiency, while considering different FL architectures. Our findings show that medical imaging datasets pose substantial challenges for current FL optimization algorithms. No single algorithm consistently delivers optimal performance across all medical FL scenarios, and many optimization algorithms may under-perform when applied to these datasets. Our experiments provide a benchmark and guidance for future research and application of FL in medical imaging contexts. Furthermore, we propose an efficient and robust method that combines generative techniques using denoising diffusion probabilistic models with label smoothing to augment datasets, widely enhancing the performance of FL on classification tasks across various medical imaging datasets.

Federated Learning (FL) aims to protect data privacy by enabling clients to collectively train machine learning models without sharing their raw data. However, recent studies demonstrate that information exchanged during FL is subject to Gradient Inversion Attacks (GIA) and, consequently, a variety of privacy-preserving methods have been integrated into FL to thwart such attacks, such as Secure Multi-party Computing (SMC), Homomorphic Encryption (HE), and Differential Privacy (DP). Despite their ability to protect data privacy, these approaches inherently involve substantial privacy-utility trade-offs. By revisiting the key to privacy exposure in FL under GIA, which lies in the frequent sharing of model gradients that contain private data, we take a new perspective by designing a novel privacy preserve FL framework that effectively ``breaks the direct connection'' between the shared parameters and the local private data to defend against GIA. Specifically, we propose a Hypernetwork Federated Learning (HyperFL) framework that utilizes hypernetworks to generate the parameters of the local model and only the hypernetwork parameters are uploaded to the server for aggregation. Theoretical analyses demonstrate the convergence rate of the proposed HyperFL, while extensive experimental results show the privacy-preserving capability and comparable performance of HyperFL.