# BlocksecRT-DETR: Decentralized Privacy-Preserving and Token-Efficient Federated Transformer Learning for Secure Real-Time Object Detection in ITS

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.12693 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12693/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 20 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.05629/) (2016)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Federated Learning: Challenges, Methods, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07873/) (2019)
- [Federated Learning with Non-IID Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.00582/) (2018)
- [DynamicViT: Efficient Vision Transformers with Dynamic Token Sparsification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02034/) (2021)
- [How To Backdoor Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.00459/) (2018)
- [DETRs Beat YOLOs on Real-time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08069/) (2023)
- [FLTrust: Byzantine-robust Federated Learning via Trust Bootstrapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.13995/) (2020)
- [Adaptive Token Sampling For Efficient Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15667/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Federated real-time object detection using transformers in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) faces three major challenges: (1) missing-class non-IID data heterogeneity from geographically diverse traffic environments, (2) latency constraints on edge hardware for high-capacity transformer models, and (3) privacy and security risks from untrusted client updates and centralized aggregation. We propose BlockSecRT-DETR, a BLOCKchain-SECured Real-Time Object DEtection TRansformer framework for ITS that provides a decentralized, token-efficient, and privacy-preserving federated training solution using RT-DETR transformer, incorporating a blockchain-secured update validation mechanism for trustworthy aggregation. In this framework, challenges (1) and (2) are jointly addressed through a unified client-side design that integrates RT-DETR training with a Token Engineering Module (TEM). TEM prunes low-utility tokens, reducing encoder complexity and latency on edge hardware, while aggregated updates mitigate non-IID data heterogeneity across clients. To address challenge (3), BlockSecRT-DETR incorporates a decentralized blockchain-secured update validation mechanism that enables tamper-proof, privacy-preserving, and trust-free authenticated model aggregation without relying on a central server. We evaluated the proposed framework under a missing-class Non-IID partition of the KITTI dataset and conducted a blockchain case study to quantify security overhead. TEM improves inference latency by 17.2% and reduces encoder FLOPs by 47.8%, while maintaining global detection accuracy (89.20% mAP@0.5). The blockchain integration adds 400 ms per round, and the ledger size remains under 12 KB due to metadata-only on-chain storage.