Federated Learning (FL) has become a key method for preserving data privacy
in Internet of Things (IoT) environments, as it trains Machine Learning (ML)
models locally while transmitting only model updates. Despite this design, FL
remains susceptible to threats such as model inversion and membership inference
attacks, which can reveal private training data. Differential Privacy (DP)
techniques are often introduced to mitigate these risks, but simply injecting
DP noise into black-box ML models can compromise accuracy, particularly in
dynamic IoT contexts, where continuous, lifelong learning leads to excessive
noise accumulation. To address this challenge, we propose Federated
HyperDimensional computing with Privacy-preserving (FedHDPrivacy), an
eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) framework that integrates
neuro-symbolic computing and DP. Unlike conventional approaches, FedHDPrivacy
actively monitors the cumulative noise across learning rounds and adds only the
additional noise required to satisfy privacy constraints. In a real-world
application for monitoring manufacturing machining processes, FedHDPrivacy
maintains high performance while surpassing standard FL frameworks - Federated
Averaging (FedAvg), Federated Proximal (FedProx), Federated Normalized
Averaging (FedNova), and Federated Optimization (FedOpt) - by up to 37%.
Looking ahead, FedHDPrivacy offers a promising avenue for further enhancements,
such as incorporating multimodal data fusion.