A Privacy Preserving and Byzantine Robust Collaborative Federated Learning Method Design

Collaborative federated learning (CFL) enables device cooperation in training shared machine learning models without reliance on a parameter server. However, the absence of a parameter server also impacts vulnerabilities associated with adversarial attacks, including privacy inference and Byzantine attacks. In this context, this paper introduces a novel CFL framework that enables each device to individually determine the subset of devices to transmit FL parameters to over the wireless network, based on its neighboring devices' location, current loss, and connection information, to achieve privacy protection and robust aggregation. This is formulated as an optimization problem whose goal is to minimize CFL training loss while satisfying the privacy preservation, robust aggregation, and transmission delay requirements. To solve this problem, a proximal policy optimization (PPO)-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm integrated with a graph neural network (GNN) is proposed. Compared to traditional algorithms that use global information with high computational complexity, the proposed GNN-RL method can be deployed on devices based on neighboring information with lower computational overhead. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can protect data privacy and increase identification accuracy by 15% compared to an algorithm in which devices are partially clustered for model aggregation.