Cost-Aware Distributed Online Learning with Strict Rejection Behavior against Adversarial Agents

Abstract

Distributed online learning in Internet of Things(IoT)-enabled multi-agent systems(MASs) is highly vulnerable to persistent adversarial interactions, particularly when malicious agents cannot be fully isolated during the transient learning stage. Existing resilient learning methods mainly focus on convergence preservation or malicious suppression, while the resulting evolution inefficiency caused by repeated corrective adaptation remains largely unexplored. To address this issue, this paper develops a cost-aware distributed online learning framework with a strict rejection behavior against adversarial agents. The proposed mechanism suppresses harmful assimilation of suspicious neighboring information and reveals a previously overlooked side effect, that is, the strict rejection may induce heterogeneous transient evolution among neighboring normal agents, leading to evolution desynchronization across the network. To mitigate this effect, a two-time-scale adaptive evolution regulation architecture is further developed, in which the outer layer dynamically adjusts the long-term evolution-rate schedule while the inner layer preserves robust online learning. Theoretical analysis establishes the dynamic tracking property of the outer-layer update and proves that the proposed regulation mechanism attenuates the propagation of strict-rejection-induced evolution desynchronization. Numerical simulations and a satellite-assisted IoT monitoring scenario demonstrate that the proposed method achieves robust and low-cost distributed online learning under persistent malicious interference.