Privacy Enhancement in Over-the-Air Federated Learning via Adaptive Receive Scaling

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Kalarde, Faeze Moradi, Liang, Ben, Dong, Min, Ahmed, Yahia A. Eldemerdash, Cheng, Ho Ting
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Kalarde, Faeze Moradi
Liang, Ben
Dong, Min
Ahmed, Yahia A. Eldemerdash
Cheng, Ho Ting
author_facet Kalarde, Faeze Moradi
Liang, Ben
Dong, Min
Ahmed, Yahia A. Eldemerdash
Cheng, Ho Ting
contents In Federated Learning (FL) with over-the-air aggregation, the quality of the signal received at the server critically depends on the receive scaling factors. While a larger scaling factor can reduce the effective noise power and improve training performance, it also compromises the privacy of devices by reducing uncertainty. In this work, we aim to adaptively design the receive scaling factors across training rounds to balance the trade-off between training convergence and privacy in an FL system under dynamic channel conditions. We formulate a stochastic optimization problem that minimizes the overall Rényi differential privacy (RDP) leakage over the entire training process, subject to a long-term constraint that ensures convergence of the global loss function. Our problem depends on unknown future information, and we observe that standard Lyapunov optimization is not applicable. Thus, we develop a new online algorithm, termed AdaScale, based on a sequence of novel per-round problems that can be solved efficiently. We further derive upper bounds on the dynamic regret and constraint violation of AdaSacle, establishing that it achieves diminishing dynamic regret in terms of time-averaged RDP leakage while ensuring convergence of FL training to a stationary point. Numerical experiments on canonical classification tasks show that our approach effectively reduces RDP and DP leakages compared with state-of-the-art benchmarks without compromising learning performance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_03860
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Privacy Enhancement in Over-the-Air Federated Learning via Adaptive Receive Scaling
Kalarde, Faeze Moradi
Liang, Ben
Dong, Min
Ahmed, Yahia A. Eldemerdash
Cheng, Ho Ting
Information Theory
Signal Processing
In Federated Learning (FL) with over-the-air aggregation, the quality of the signal received at the server critically depends on the receive scaling factors. While a larger scaling factor can reduce the effective noise power and improve training performance, it also compromises the privacy of devices by reducing uncertainty. In this work, we aim to adaptively design the receive scaling factors across training rounds to balance the trade-off between training convergence and privacy in an FL system under dynamic channel conditions. We formulate a stochastic optimization problem that minimizes the overall Rényi differential privacy (RDP) leakage over the entire training process, subject to a long-term constraint that ensures convergence of the global loss function. Our problem depends on unknown future information, and we observe that standard Lyapunov optimization is not applicable. Thus, we develop a new online algorithm, termed AdaScale, based on a sequence of novel per-round problems that can be solved efficiently. We further derive upper bounds on the dynamic regret and constraint violation of AdaSacle, establishing that it achieves diminishing dynamic regret in terms of time-averaged RDP leakage while ensuring convergence of FL training to a stationary point. Numerical experiments on canonical classification tasks show that our approach effectively reduces RDP and DP leakages compared with state-of-the-art benchmarks without compromising learning performance.
title Privacy Enhancement in Over-the-Air Federated Learning via Adaptive Receive Scaling
topic Information Theory
Signal Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03860