Privacy-Preserving Federated Neural Architecture Search With Enhanced Robustness for Edge Computing

With the development of large-scale artificial intelligence services, edge devices are becoming essential providers of data and computing power. However, these edge devices are not immune to malicious attacks. Federated learning (FL), while protecting privacy of decentralized data through secure aggregation, struggles to trace adversaries and lacks optimization for heterogeneity. We discover that FL augmented with Differentiable Architecture Search (DARTS) can improve resilience against backdoor attacks while compatible with secure aggregation. Based on this, we propose a federated neural architecture search (NAS) framwork named SLNAS. The architecture of SLNAS is built on three pivotal components: a server-side search space generation method that employs an evolutionary algorithm with dual encodings, a federated NAS process based on DARTS, and client-side architecture tuning that utilizes Gumbel softmax combined with knowledge distillation. To validate robustness, we adapt a framework that includes backdoor attacks based on trigger optimization, data poisoning, and model poisoning, targeting both model weights and architecture parameters. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SLNAS not only effectively counters advanced backdoor attacks but also handles heterogeneity, outperforming defense baselines across a wide range of backdoor attack scenarios.