AIGU-DPFL: Adaptive Differentially Private Federated Learning with Importance-Based Gradient Updates
Fangfang Shan, Zhuo Chen, Yifan Mao, Yuhang Liu, Lulu Fan, Yanlong Lu · Computers · 2026
Federated learning, a decentralized machine learning framework, allows multiple participants to jointly train models while keeping their raw data local and unshared. Nevertheless, during the exchange of model updates, the communicated information can still introduce privacy vulnerabilities and potentially result in the exposure of user data. Over the past few years, differential privacy methods have been broadly incorporated into federated learning frameworks to strengthen the protection of sensitive data. Nevertheless, the noise required to satisfy differential privacy guarantees often causes significant degradation in model performance. Prior studies have typically employed a fixed noise-injection strategy following gradient clipping. Although such methods provide privacy protection, they overlook the varying importance of different gradient dimensions, resulting in noise being injected into unimportant or redundant parameters, thereby causing unnecessary performance loss. To address these limitations, we propose an adaptive differentially private federated learning scheme with importance-based gradient updates (AIGU-DPFL). Specifically, we focus on coordinates with high information content and introduce an adaptive noise injection mechanism, which perturbs gradient updates to satisfy differential privacy guarantees while dynamically controlling noise intensity, thereby achieving sparse and noise-effective gradient updates. AIGU-DPFL markedly enhances the training effectiveness of federated learning models. Comprehensive evaluations conducted on real-world datasets indicate that the proposed method achieves superior performance compared to existing differentially private federated learning techniques.