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Enrique Tomás Martínez Beltrán
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Enrique Tomás Martínez Beltrán

Postdoctoral research in AI, cybersecurity and federated learning, spanning threat analysis, closed-loop cyberdefense and trustworthy decentralized learning.

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  1. Home
  2. Decentralized Federated Learning
Research topic

Decentralized Federated Learning

Node-to-node and semi-decentralized learning systems for security-critical environments where raw data cannot be centralized.

DFLFederated LearningDecentralized Federated Learning

What decentralized federated learning solves

Decentralized Federated Learning (DFL) studies how multiple organizations, devices or agents can train models collaboratively without moving raw data to a central server. This matters when centralization is impractical, legally sensitive or operationally fragile, such as in defense, IoT, industrial monitoring and cross-organization cybersecurity.

  • Training keeps data local while sharing model updates, prototypes or distilled knowledge.
  • The architecture reduces reliance on a single coordinator and supports direct node-to-node collaboration.
  • Security, robustness and communication efficiency become first-order research constraints.

Core research challenges

The hardest DFL scenarios combine non-IID data, heterogeneous devices, intermittent connectivity and adversarial behavior. A robust system must decide which peers to trust, how to aggregate information, how to detect malicious updates and how to continue learning when parts of the federation are unstable.

  • Byzantine and poisoning attacks against decentralized aggregation.
  • Communication-efficient learning with limited bandwidth and unstable peers.
  • Fairness and reliability when clients have different data, resources and availability.

How this portfolio connects the topic

The related work in this site covers DFL frameworks, situational awareness, reputation, prototype exchange, ensemble distillation and security monitoring. The goal is not only to train distributed models, but to make their behavior understandable, resilient and useful in security-critical deployments.

On this page

What decentralized federated learning solvesCore research challengesHow this portfolio connects the topicFrequently asked questions

Frequently asked questions

How is decentralized federated learning different from standard federated learning?

Standard federated learning usually relies on a central coordinator. DFL removes or reduces that central role so peers can exchange updates, models or representations directly or through semi-decentralized structures.

Why is DFL relevant for cyberdefense?

Cyberdefense often involves sensitive telemetry distributed across organizations or devices. DFL can support collaborative detection and mitigation while keeping raw evidence local.

What makes DFL hard to deploy?

The main barriers are unreliable peers, non-IID data, communication limits, adversarial clients, privacy risk in shared updates and the lack of mature operational tooling.

Related projects

DEFENDIS: Decentralized Federated Learning for IoT Device Identification and Security

DEFENDIS develops a framework for uniquely identifying IoT devices in a distributed manner while solving security threats through decentralized federated learning.

View Project

TITAN: Trustworthy and Intelligent Threat Analysis

A project with armasuisse Cyber-Defence Campus investigating trustworthy threat intelligence sharing and verification algorithms.

View Project

DECIMAL: DECentralized Intelligent Multimodal Adaptive Learning

A completed collaboration with armasuisse Cyber-Defence Campus that developed robust, resource-efficient and adaptive learning for multimodal sensor ecosystems.

View Project

DATRIS: Decentralized AI for Trustworthy and Resource-efficient Intelligent Systems

Developed decentralized AI solutions addressing computational constraints and trust validation under armasuisse Cyber-Defence Campus sponsorship.

View Project

Related notes

Robust Decentralized Federated Learning: Limits and Open Questions

A measured research agenda for dynamic topologies, manipulated context, formal privacy analysis and external validity in robust DFL.

Research AgendaDecentralized Federated LearningPrivacy-Preserving AI
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D-MoE: Distributed Mixture of Experts for Edge LLMs

A design note on distributed or decentralized MoE systems, with explicit terminology, routing trade-offs and safeguards for heterogeneous edge deployments.

D-MoEDistributed AIMoE
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Communication Efficiency in DFL: Why Prototypes Matter

A practical analysis of payload size, round cost and the prototype communication results reported for Modalis on AVMNIST.

Communication EfficiencyPrototype LearningEdge AI
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Modalis: Prototype Exchange for Heterogeneous Multimodal DFL

An original technical walkthrough of the Modalis prototype-based approach for decentralized learning with non-IID classes and missing modalities.

ModalisMultimodal LearningPrototype Learning
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When Federated Clients See Different Modalities

Why decentralized multimodal learning needs explicit missing-modality handling, representation alignment and evaluation beyond a global average.

Multimodal LearningNon-IID DataMissing Modalities
Read More