# When Differential Privacy Meets Wireless Federated Learning: An Improved Analysis for Privacy and Convergence

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.19040 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19040/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 18 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.05629/) (2016)
- [Deep Learning with Differential Privacy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.00133/) (2016)
- [Federated Learning via Over-the-Air Computation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.11750/) (2018)
- [Privacy Amplification by Iteration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06651/) (2018)
- [Private Selection from Private Candidates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.07971/) (2018)
- [Differential Privacy Dynamics of Langevin Diffusion and Noisy Gradient Descent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05855/) (2021)
- [Privacy For Free: Wireless Federated Learning Via Uncoded Transmission With Adaptive Power Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05459/) (2020)
- [Privacy of Noisy Stochastic Gradient Descent: More Iterations without More Privacy Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13710/) (2022)
- [Private Wireless Federated Learning with Anonymous Over-the-Air Computation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.08579/) (2020)
- [An Improved Privacy and Utility Analysis of Differentially Private SGD with Bounded Domain and Smooth Losses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17772/) (2025)
- [Differential Privacy as a Perk: Federated Learning over Multiple-Access Fading Channels with a Multi-Antenna Base Station](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.23463/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Differentially private wireless federated learning (DPWFL) is a promising framework for protecting sensitive user data. However, foundational questions on how to precisely characterize privacy loss remain open, and existing work is further limited by convergence analyses that rely on restrictive convexity assumptions or ignore the effect of gradient clipping. To overcome these issues, we present a comprehensive analysis of privacy and convergence for DPWFL with general smooth non-convex loss objectives. Our analysis explicitly incorporates both device selection and mini-batch sampling, and shows that the privacy loss can converge to a constant rather than diverge with the number of iterations. Moreover, we establish convergence guarantees with gradient clipping and derive an explicit privacy-utility trade-off. Numerical results validate our theoretical findings.
