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1. Reducing Methane Emissions in Rice Cultivation Using Federated Learning: A Privacy-Preserving Framework for Climate-Smart Agriculture

   Ramadas, Shwetha; Krishnappa, Krutthika Hirebasur; Trivedi, Sudhir (April 2026, Springer LLN)

   Methane (CH4) emission from rice paddies is a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture. Currently, most models for methane prediction from rice paddies depend on collecting field data and sending it to a server. In this new paradigm, several privacy concerns arise, model scalability is restricted, and a large number of data points are exposed to the attacker. This paper addresses all privacy concerns by providing an edge-based solution for modeling methane emissions from rice paddies that leverages data from edge sensors at respective locations, while keeping individual sensor data private. The method employs different machine learning (ML) algorithms, including Linear Regression, Random Forest, XGBoost, and a Feedforward Neural Net-work (FNN), implemented using TensorFlow Federated (TFF) in both centralized and federated learning (FL) frameworks. The FL-based FNN achieved an R2 score of 0.91, which was superior to both centralized classical and centralized FL models, especially for highly non-IID client-side data distributions in sensor datasets. In summary, this paper extends the current literature on modeling methane emissions from rice paddies and provides a comprehensive evaluation of our proposed FL system architecture, an in-depth discussion of the communication resources re-quired for FL implementation, and an examination of the effects of ablation studies on clients’ data heterogeneity. Therefore, the proposed FL approach is efficient and scalable, enabling safe, privacy-preserving modeling of methane emissions from rice paddies to effectively implement Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) and mitigate global warming while supporting sustainable rice cultivation. 

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2. Latency-Aware Semi-Synchronous Client Selection and Model Aggregation for Wireless Federated Learning

   https://doi.org/10.3390/fi15110352  

   Yu, Liangkun; Sun, Xiang; Albelaihi, Rana; Yi, Chen (November 2023, Future Internet)

   Federated learning (FL) is a collaborative machine-learning (ML) framework particularly suited for ML models requiring numerous training samples, such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), and Random Forest, in the context of various applications, e.g., next-word prediction and eHealth. FL involves various clients participating in the training process by uploading their local models to an FL server in each global iteration. The server aggregates these models to update a global model. The traditional FL process may encounter bottlenecks, known as the straggler problem, where slower clients delay the overall training time. This paper introduces the Latency-awarE Semi-synchronous client Selection and mOdel aggregation for federated learNing (LESSON) method. LESSON allows clients to participate at different frequencies: faster clients contribute more frequently, therefore mitigating the straggler problem and expediting convergence. Moreover, LESSON provides a tunable trade-off between model accuracy and convergence rate by setting varying deadlines. Simulation results show that LESSON outperforms two baseline methods, namely FedAvg and FedCS, in terms of convergence speed and maintains higher model accuracy compared to FedCS. 

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3. Heterogeneous Ensemble Knowledge Transfer for Training Large Models in Federated Learning

   Yae Jee Cho; Andre Manoel; Gauri Joshi; Robert Sim; Dimitrios Dimitriadis (April 2022, Proceedings of the Thirty-First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) Main Track)

   Federated learning (FL) enables edge-devices to collaboratively learn a model without disclosing their private data to a central aggregating server. Most existing FL algorithms require models of identical architecture to be deployed across the clients and server, making it infeasible to train large models due to clients' limited system resources. In this work, we propose a novel ensemble knowledge transfer method named Fed-ET in which small models (different in architecture) are trained on clients, and used to train a larger model at the server. Unlike in conventional ensemble learning, in FL the ensemble can be trained on clients' highly heterogeneous data. Cognizant of this property, Fed-ET uses a weighted consensus distillation scheme with diversity regularization that efficiently extracts reliable consensus from the ensemble while improving generalization by exploiting the diversity within the ensemble. We show the generalization bound for the ensemble of weighted models trained on heterogeneous datasets that supports the intuition of Fed-ET. Our experiments on image and language tasks show that Fed-ET significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art FL algorithms with fewer communicated parameters, and is also robust against high data-heterogeneity. 

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4. Is Aggregation the Only Choice? Federated Learning via Layer-wise Model Recombination

   Hu, M; Yue, Z; Xie, X; Chen, C; Huang, Y; Wei, X; Lian, X; Liu, Y; Chen, M (August 2024, Association for Computing Machinery)

   Although Federated Learning (FL) enables global model training across clients without compromising their raw data, due to the unevenly distributed data among clients, existing Federated Averaging (FedAvg)-based methods suffer from the problem of low inference performance. Specifically, different data distributions among clients lead to various optimization directions of local models. Aggregating local models usually results in a low-generalized global model, which performs worse on most of the clients. To address the above issue, inspired by the observation from a geometric perspective that a well-generalized solution is located in a flat area rather than a sharp area, we propose a novel and heuristic FL paradigm named FedMR (Federated Model Recombination). The goal of FedMR is to guide the recombined models to be trained towards a flat area. Unlike conventional FedAvg-based methods, in FedMR, the cloud server recombines collected local models by shuffling each layer of them to generate multiple recombined models for local training on clients rather than an aggregated global model. Since the area of the flat area is larger than the sharp area, when local models are located in different areas, recombined models have a higher probability of locating in a flat area. When all recombined models are located in the same flat area, they are optimized towards the same direction. We theoretically analyze the convergence of model recombination. Experimental results show that, compared with state-of-the-art FL methods, FedMR can significantly improve the inference accuracy without exposing the privacy of each client. 

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5. A New Implementation of Federated Learning for Privacy and Security Enhancement

   https://doi.org/10.1109/GLOBECOM48099.2022.10001614  

   Ma, Xiang; Sun, Haijian; Hu, Rose Qingyang; Qian, Yi (December 2022, IEEE Globecom 2022)

   Motivated by the ever-increasing concerns on personal data privacy and the rapidly growing data volume at local clients, federated learning (FL) has emerged as a new machine learning setting. An FL system is comprised of a central parameter server and multiple local clients. It keeps data at local clients and learns a centralized model by sharing the model parameters learned locally. No local data needs to be shared, and privacy can be well protected. Nevertheless, since it is the model instead of the raw data that is shared, the system can be exposed to the poisoning model attacks launched by malicious clients. Furthermore, it is challenging to identify malicious clients since no local client data is available on the server. Besides, membership inference attacks can still be performed by using the uploaded model to estimate the client's local data, leading to privacy disclosure. In this work, we first propose a model update based federated averaging algorithm to defend against Byzantine attacks such as additive noise attacks and sign-flipping attacks. The individual client model initialization method is presented to provide further privacy protections from the membership inference attacks by hiding the individual local machine learning model. When combining these two schemes, privacy and security can be both effectively enhanced. The proposed schemes are proved to converge experimentally under non-lID data distribution when there are no attacks. Under Byzantine attacks, the proposed schemes perform much better than the classical model based FedAvg algorithm. 

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