FLAV: Federated Learning for Autonomous Vehicle privacy protection

Autonomous Vehicle Systems are committed to safer, more efficient and more convenient transportation on the roads of the future. However, concerns about vehicle data privacy and security remain significant. Federated Learning, as a decentralized machine learning approach, allows multiple devices or data sources to collaboratively train models without sharing raw data, providing essential privacy protection. In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving framework for autonomous vehicles, named FLAV. First, we use a multi-chain parallel aggregation strategy to transmit model parameters and design a model parameter filtering mechanism, which reduces communication overhead by filtering out the local model parameters of certain vehicles, thereby alleviating bandwidth pressure. Second, we introduce a dynamic adjustment mechanism that automatically adjusts regularization strength by comparing each vehicle’s local parameters with the cumulative parameters of preceding vehicles in the chain. This mechanism balances local training with global consistency, ensuring the model’s adaptability to local data while improving coordination between vehicles in the chain. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method reduces communication costs while improving model accuracy and privacy protection level, effectively ensuring the security of autonomous driving data.