Literature Database Entry

klauck2025communication-efficient

Norman Finlay Klauck, "Communication-Efficient Federated Reinforcement Learning under Differential Privacy," Bachelor Thesis, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), TU Berlin (TUB), August 2025. (Advisor: Youming Tao; Referees: Falko Dressler and Thomas Sikora)

Abstract

In Federated Reinforcement Learning (FRL), agents regularly exchange information about their environments. In real-world applications, this information is often private and therefore requires protection. At the same time, it is desirable to reduce the number of times that communication occurs to boost efficiency. Most existing work exclusively focuses on achieving privacy by perturbing the exchanged data. However, methods used to achieve efficient communication have been shown to cause privacy leakage even when such perturbations are performed. Consequently, private algorithms are usually limited to non-federated settings where communication efficiency is less of a concern. This thesis proposes Fed-UCBVI-JDP, an FRL-algorithm designed to both ensure privacy and maintain communication complexity in logarithmic order of the number of time steps T. The definition of privacy applied is Joint Differential Privacy (JDP). The algorithm utilizes existing methods to perturb exchanged data and reduce communication while avoiding privacy leakage through a novel use of the Sparse Vector Technique (SVT). The thesis provides proofs of guarantees in both privacy and communication complexity. It also includes simulation results that both reinforce the derived communication complexity and show the algorithm achieving regret in logarithmic order of T.

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Norman Finlay Klauck

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@phdthesis{klauck2025communication-efficient,
    author = {Klauck, Norman Finlay},
    title = {{Communication-Efficient Federated Reinforcement Learning under Differential Privacy}},
    advisor = {Tao, Youming},
    institution = {School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS)},
    location = {Berlin, Germany},
    month = {8},
    referee = {Dressler, Falko and Sikora, Thomas},
    school = {TU Berlin (TUB)},
    type = {Bachelor Thesis},
    year = {2025},
   }
   
   

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Last modified: 2026-05-02