Accelerated Vertical Federated Adversarial Learning through Decoupling Layer-Wise Dependencies

Vertical Federated Learning (VFL) enables participants to collaboratively train models on aligned samples while keeping their heterogeneous features private and distributed. Despite their utility, VFL models remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks during inference. Adversarial Training (AT), which generates adversarial examples at each training iteration, stands as the most effective defense for improving model robustness. However, applying AT in VFL settings (VFAL) faces significant computational efficiency challenges, as the distributed training framework necessitates iterative propagations across participants. To this end, we propose DecVFAL framework, which substantially accelerates VFAL training through a dual-level Dec oupling mechanism applied during adversarial sample generation. Specifically, we first decouple the bottom modules of clients (directly responsible for adversarial updates) from the remaining networks, enabling efficient lazy sequential propagations that reduce communication frequency through delayed gradients. We further introduce decoupled parallel backpropagation to accelerate delayed gradient computation by eliminating idle waiting through parallel processing across modules. Additionally, we are the first to establish convergence analysis for VFAL, rigorously characterizing how our decoupling mechanism interacts with existing VFL dynamics, and prove that DecVFAL achieves an O (1 / √ K ) convergence rate matching that of standard VFLs. Experimental results show that DecVFAL ensures competitive robustness while significantly achieving about 3 ∼ 10 × speed up.