Publications

You can also find my articles on my Google Scholar profile.

Journal Articles

Survey of Federated Learning Models for Spatial-Temporal Mobility Applications

Published in ACM Transactions on Spatial Algorithms and Systems, 2024

A comprehensive survey of federated learning models applied to spatial-temporal mobility contexts.

Recommended citation: Yacine Belal, Sonia Ben Mokhtar, Hamed Haddadi, Jaron Wang, Afra Mashhadi. (2024). "Survey of Federated Learning Models for Spatial-Temporal Mobility Applications." ACM Transactions on Spatial Algorithms and Systems, 10(3), 1–39.
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PEPPER: Empowering User-Centric Recommender Systems over Gossip Learning

Published in IMWUT (UbiComp), 2022

Introduces PEPPER, a decentralized gossip-based framework for recommender systems.

Recommended citation: Yacine Belal, Aurélien Bellet, Sonia Ben Mokhtar, Vlad Nitu. (2022). "PEPPER." Proc. ACM Interact. Mob. Wearable Ubiquitous Technol., 6(3), 101:1–101:27.
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Conference Papers

Inferring Communities of Interest in Collaborative Learning-based Recommender Systems

Published in IEEE ICDCS (To Appear), 2025

A privacy attack that aims at identifying communities of interest in collaborative recommender systems.

Recommended citation: Yacine Belal, Mohamed Maouche, Sonia Ben Mokhtar, Anthony Simonet-Boulogne. (2025). "Inferring Communities of Interest in Collaborative Learning-based Recommender Systems." IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS). To appear.
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Benchmarking Clustered Federated Learning Algorithms for Next-Point Prediction

Published in IEEE DCOSS-IoT (To Appear), 2025

Benchmarks clustered FL algorithms for next-location prediction in smart systems.

Recommended citation: Sonal Yadav, Yacine Belal, Brent Lagesse, Afra Mashhadi. (2025). "Benchmarking Clustered Federated Learning Algorithms for Next-Point Prediction." IEEE DCOSS-IoT. To appear.
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Preprints

GRANITE: a Byzantine-Resilient Dynamic Gossip Learning Framework

Published in arXiv, 2025

Introduces GRANITE, a framework that encompasses a history-based Random Peer Sampling protocol and a higher bound on the byzantine presence which is leveraged by underying robust aggregators.

Recommended citation: Yacine Belal, Mohamed Maouche, Sonia Ben Mokhtar, Anthony Simonet-Boulogne. (2025). "GRANITE: a Byzantine-Resilient Dynamic Gossip Learning Framework." arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.17471.
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Scrutinizing the Vulnerability of Decentralized Learning to Membership Inference Attacks

Published in arXiv, 2024

Analyzes privacy risks in decentralized learning from a membership inference standpoint.

Recommended citation: Ousmane Touat, Jezekael Brunon, Yacine Belal, Julien Nicolas, Mohamed Maouche, César Sabater, Sonia Ben Mokhtar. (2024). "Scrutinizing the Vulnerability of Decentralized Learning to Membership Inference Attacks." arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.12837.
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