Differential privacy-based personalized federated learning for heterogeneous data

Hou Junkang1,2
Guo Rui1,2
Zhang Yinghui1,2
Liu Guangjun3
1. School of Cyberspace Security, Xi'an University of Posts & Telecommunications, Xi'an 710121, China
2. National Engineering Research Center for Secured Wireless, Xi'an University of Posts and Telecommunications, Xi'an 710121, China
3. School of Information Engineering, Xi'an University, Xi'an 710065, China

Abstract

This study addresses the coexistence of performance degradation and privacy leakage risks caused by data heterogeneity in federated learning, and aims to design a personalized federated learning scheme that both protects privacy and adapts to heterogeneous data. It proposes a differential privacy-based personalized federated learning framework (DP-PFL) , which mainly includes three components: 1) An adaptive differential privacy gradient perturbation mechanism that dynamically attenuated noise intensity according to training progress and allocated noise differentially based on the importance of gradient components; 2) A meta-learning-based personalized training strategy that achieved rapid local adaptation by optimizing global initialization parameters and adaptive model mixing; 3) A multi-level privacy defense system that combined Bayesian uncertainty enhancement, temperature scaling, and output noise injection. Theoretical analysis confirms that DP-PFL satisfies the (ε, δ) -differential privacy constraint and maintains an O(1/√T) convergence rate. Experiments on MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets show that DP-PFL achieved accuracy rates of 85.5% and 74.2% respectively in the highly heterogeneous scenario with α=0.1; its defense success rates against membership inference, attribute inference, and gradient inversion attacks reached 54.6%, 51.5%, and PSNR=6.8dB respectively, representing an average improvement of 10.2% over baselines. DP-PFL realizes effective personalized learning for heterogeneous data under strict privacy protection constraints and provides theoretical support and practical guidance for the secure deployment of federated learning.

Foundation Support

国家密码科学基金资助项目(2025NCSF02037)
国家自然科学基金资助项目(62072369)
陕西省重点研发计划基金资助项目(2020ZDLGY08-04)
陕西省创新能力支持计划基金资助项目(2020KJXX-052)
陕西省自然科学基金一般项目(2024JC-YBMS-545,2024JC-YBMS-557)
陕西省高校青年创新团队(23JP160)
西安市科技计划项目(23KGDW0018-2023)

Publish Information

DOI: 10.19734/j.issn.1001-3695.2025.09.0411
Publish at: Application Research of Computers Accepted Paper, Vol. 43, 2026 No. 6

Publish History

[2026-02-25] Accepted Paper

Cite This Article

侯俊康, 郭瑞, 张应辉, 等. 异构数据的差分隐私个性化联邦学习方案 [J]. 计算机应用研究, 2026, 43 (6). (2026-02-25). https://doi.org/10.19734/j.issn.1001-3695.2025.09.0411. (Hou Junkang, Guo Rui, Zhang Yinghui, et al. Differential privacy-based personalized federated learning for heterogeneous data [J]. Application Research of Computers, 2026, 43 (6). (2026-02-25). https://doi.org/10.19734/j.issn.1001-3695.2025.09.0411. )

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  • Application Research of Computers Monthly Journal
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    CN  51-1196/TP

Application Research of Computers, founded in 1984, is an academic journal of computing technology sponsored by Sichuan Institute of Computer Sciences under the Science and Technology Department of Sichuan Province.

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