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A Review on Federated Learning Architectures for Privacy-Preserving AI: Lightweight and Secure Cloud–Edge–End Collaboration

Shanhao Zhan, Lian-Fen Huang, Gaoyu Luo, Shaolong Zheng, Zhi-Bin Gao, Han-Chieh Chao

Electronics, 2025

85 citations

Abstract

Federated learning (FL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for enabling collaborative training of machine learning models while preserving data privacy. However, the massive heterogeneity of data and devices, communication constraints, and security threats pose significant challenges to its practical implementation. This paper provides a system review of the state-of-the-art techniques and future research directions in FL, with a focus on addressing these challenges in resource-constrained environments by a cloud–edge–end collaboration FL architecture. We first introduce the foundations of cloud–edge–end collaboration and FL. We then discuss the key technical challenges. Next, we delve into the pillars of trustworthy AI in the federated context, covering robustness, fairness, and explainability. We propose a dimension reconstruction of trusted AI and analyze the foundations of each trustworthiness pillar. Furthermore, we present a lightweight FL framework for resource-constrained edge–end devices, analyzing the core contradictions and proposing optimization paradigms. Finally, we highlight advanced topics and future research directions to provide valuable insights into the field.

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