SAFE: Secure and Accurate Federated Learning for Privacy-Preserving Brain-Computer Interfaces

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Jia, Tianwang, Chen, Xiaoqing, Wu, Dongrui
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Jia, Tianwang
Chen, Xiaoqing
Wu, Dongrui
author_facet Jia, Tianwang
Chen, Xiaoqing
Wu, Dongrui
contents Electroencephalogram (EEG)-based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) are widely adopted due to their efficiency and portability; however, their decoding algorithms still face multiple challenges, including inadequate generalization, adversarial vulnerability, and privacy leakage. This paper proposes Secure and Accurate FEderated learning (SAFE), a federated learning-based approach that protects user privacy by keeping data local during model training. SAFE employs local batch-specific normalization to mitigate cross-subject feature distribution shifts and hence improves model generalization. It further enhances adversarial robustness by introducing perturbations in both the input space and the parameter space through federated adversarial training and adversarial weight perturbation. Experiments on five EEG datasets from motor imagery (MI) and event-related potential (ERP) BCI paradigms demonstrated that SAFE consistently outperformed 14 state-of-the-art approaches in both decoding accuracy and adversarial robustness, while ensuring privacy protection. Notably, it even outperformed centralized training approaches that do not consider privacy protection at all. To our knowledge, SAFE is the first algorithm to simultaneously achieve high decoding accuracy, strong adversarial robustness, and reliable privacy protection without using any calibration data from the target subject, making it highly desirable for real-world BCIs.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_05789
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publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SAFE: Secure and Accurate Federated Learning for Privacy-Preserving Brain-Computer Interfaces
Jia, Tianwang
Chen, Xiaoqing
Wu, Dongrui
Human-Computer Interaction
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Electroencephalogram (EEG)-based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) are widely adopted due to their efficiency and portability; however, their decoding algorithms still face multiple challenges, including inadequate generalization, adversarial vulnerability, and privacy leakage. This paper proposes Secure and Accurate FEderated learning (SAFE), a federated learning-based approach that protects user privacy by keeping data local during model training. SAFE employs local batch-specific normalization to mitigate cross-subject feature distribution shifts and hence improves model generalization. It further enhances adversarial robustness by introducing perturbations in both the input space and the parameter space through federated adversarial training and adversarial weight perturbation. Experiments on five EEG datasets from motor imagery (MI) and event-related potential (ERP) BCI paradigms demonstrated that SAFE consistently outperformed 14 state-of-the-art approaches in both decoding accuracy and adversarial robustness, while ensuring privacy protection. Notably, it even outperformed centralized training approaches that do not consider privacy protection at all. To our knowledge, SAFE is the first algorithm to simultaneously achieve high decoding accuracy, strong adversarial robustness, and reliable privacy protection without using any calibration data from the target subject, making it highly desirable for real-world BCIs.
title SAFE: Secure and Accurate Federated Learning for Privacy-Preserving Brain-Computer Interfaces
topic Human-Computer Interaction
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05789