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1. Privacy-Preserving Distributed Link Predictions Among Peers in Online Classrooms Using Federated Learning

   https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15870178  

   Hridi, Anurata; Hoq, Muntasir; Gao, Zhikai; Lynch, Collin; Sahay, Rajeev; Hosseinalipour, Seyyedali; Akram, Bita (July 2025, International Educational Data Mining Society)

   Mills, Caitlin; Alexandron, Giora; Taibi, Davide; Lo_Bosco, Giosuè; Paquette, Luc (Ed.)

   Social interactions among classroom peers, represented as social learning networks (SLNs), play a crucial role in enhancing learning outcomes. While SLN analysis has recently garnered attention, most existing approaches rely on centralized training, where data is aggregated and processed on a local/cloud server with direct access to raw data. However, in real-world educational settings, such direct access across multiple classrooms is often restricted due to privacy concerns. Furthermore, training models on isolated classroom data prevents the identification of common interaction patterns that exist across multiple classrooms, thereby limiting model performance. To address these challenges, we propose one of the first frameworks that integrates Federated Learning (FL), a distributed and collaborative machine learning (ML) paradigm, with SLNs derived from students' interactions in multiple classrooms' online forums to predict future link formations (i.e., interactions) among students. By leveraging FL, our approach enables collaborative model training across multiple classrooms while preserving data privacy, as it eliminates the need for raw data centralization. Recognizing that each classroom may exhibit unique student interaction dynamics, we further employ model personalization techniques to adapt the FL model to individual classroom characteristics. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in capturing both shared and classroom-specific representations of student interactions in SLNs. Additionally, we utilize explainable AI (XAI) techniques to interpret model predictions, identifying key factors that influence link formation across different classrooms. These insights unveil the drivers of social learning interactions within a privacy-preserving, collaborative, and distributed ML framework—an aspect that has not been explored before. 

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2. Revolutionizing AI-Assisted Education with Federated Learning: A Pathway to Distributed, Privacy-Preserving, and Debiased Learning Ecosystems

   https://doi.org/10.1609/aaaiss.v3i1.31217  

   Hridi, Anurata Prabha; Sahay, Rajeev; Hosseinalipour, Seyyedali; Akram, Bita (May 2024, Proceedings of the AAAI Symposium Series)

   The majority of current research on the application of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education relies on centralized model training architectures. Typically, this involves pooling data at a centralized location alongside an ML model training module, such as a cloud server. However, this approach necessitates transferring student data across the network, leading to privacy concerns. In this paper, we explore the application of federated learning (FL), a highly recognized distributed ML technique, within the educational ecosystem. We highlight the potential benefits FL offers to students, classrooms, and institutions. Also, we identify a range of technical, logistical, and ethical challenges that impede the sustainable implementation of FL in the education sector. Finally, we discuss a series of open research directions, focusing on nuanced aspects of FL implementation in educational contexts. These directions aim to explore and address the complexities of applying FL in varied educational settings, ensuring its deployment is technologically sound, beneficial, and equitable for all stakeholders involved. 

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3. Enhancing Data Security in Federated Learning with Dilithium

   https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCE63647.2025.10929843  

   Phan, Quoc Bao; Nguyen, Hien; Ngoc, Phap Duong; Nguyen, Tuy Tan (March 2025, Proceedings of IEEE International Symposium on Consumer Electronics)

   Federated learning (FL) enables multiple parties to collaboratively train machine learning models while preserving data privacy. However, securing communication within FL frameworks remains a significant challenge due to potential vulnerabilities to data breaches and integrity attacks. This paper proposes a novel approach using Dilithium, a robust digital signature framework, to enhance data security in FL. By integrating Dilithium into FL protocols, this study demonstrates robust communication security, preventing data tampering and unauthorized access, thereby promoting safer and more efficient collaborative model training across distributed networks. Furthermore, our approach incorporates an optimized client selection algorithm and a parallelized GPU-based training process that reduces latency and ensures seamless synchronization among participants. Experimental results demonstrate that our system achieves a total processing time of 6.891 seconds, significantly outperforming the 10.24 seconds of normal FL and 12.32 seconds of FL-Dilithium systems on the same computing platforms. Additionally, the proposed model achieves an accuracy of 94%, surpassing the 93% of the normal FL. 

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4. The Federation Strikes Back: A Survey of Federated Learning Privacy Attacks, Defenses, Applications, and Policy Landscape

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3724113  

   Zhao, Joshua; Bagchi, Saurabh; Avestimehr, Salman; Chan, Kevin; Chaterji, Somali; Dimitriadis, Dimitris; Li, Jiacheng; Li, Ninghui; Nourian, Arash; Roth, Holger (September 2025, ACM Computing Surveys)

   Deep learning has shown incredible potential across a wide array of tasks, and accompanied by this growth has been an insatiable appetite for data. However, a large amount of data needed for enabling deep learning is stored on personal devices, and recent concerns on privacy have further highlighted challenges for accessing such data. As a result, federated learning (FL) has emerged as an important privacy-preserving technology that enables collaborative training of machine learning models without the need to send the raw, potentially sensitive, data to a central server. However, the fundamental premise that sending model updates to a server is privacy-preserving only holds if the updates cannot be “reverse engineered” to infer information about the private training data. It has been shown under a wide variety of settings that this privacy premise doesnothold. In this article we provide a comprehensive literature review of the different privacy attacks and defense methods in FL. We identify the current limitations of these attacks and highlight the settings in which the privacy of an FL client can be broken. We further dissect some of the successful industry applications of FL and draw lessons for future successful adoption. We survey the emerging landscape of privacy regulation for FL and conclude with future directions for taking FL toward the cherished goal of generating accurate models while preserving the privacy of the data from its participants. 

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5. FedNIC: enhancing privacy-preserving federated learning via homomorphic encryption offload on SmartNIC

   https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomp.2024.1465352  

   Choi, Sean; Patel, Disha; Zad_Tootaghaj, Diman; Cao, Lianjie; Ahmed, Faraz; Sharma, Puneet (October 2024, Frontiers in Computer Science)

   Federated learning (FL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for secure distributed machine learning model training across multiple clients or devices, enabling model training without having to share data across the clients. However, recent studies revealed that FL could be vulnerable to data leakage and reconstruction attacks even if the data itself are never shared with another client. Thus, to resolve such vulnerability and improve the privacy of all clients, a class of techniques, called privacy-preserving FL, incorporates encryption techniques, such as homomorphic encryption (HE), to encrypt and fully protect model information from being exposed to other parties. A downside to this approach is that encryption schemes like HE are very compute-intensive, often causing inefficient and excessive use of client CPU resources that can be used for other uses. To alleviate this issue, this study introduces a novel approach by leveraging smart network interface cards (SmartNICs) to offload compute-intensive HE operations of privacy-preserving FL. By employing SmartNICs as hardware accelerators, we enable efficient computation of HE while saving CPU cycles and other server resources for more critical tasks. In addition, by offloading encryption from the host to another device, the details of encryption remain secure even if the host is compromised, ultimately improving the security of the entire FL system. Given such benefits, this paper presents an FL system named FedNIC that implements the above approach, with an in-depth description of the architecture, implementation, and performance evaluations. Our experimental results demonstrate a more secure FL system with no loss in model accuracy and up to 25% in reduced host CPU cycle, but with a roughly 46% increase in total training time, showing the feasibility and tradeoffs of utilizing SmartNICs as an encryption offload device in federated learning scenarios. Finally, we illustrate promising future study and potential optimizations for a more secure and privacy-preserving federated learning system. 

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