FedMaJ: Ordinal Meta-Aggregation for Federated Learning Using Majority-Judgment Voting

Abstract

Federated learning traditionally relies on a fixed aggregation rule despite shifting client state and wireless dynamics. We present FedMaJ, a framework that dynamically selects aggregation rules via Majority Judgment voting. During voting rounds, clients evaluate candidate models across performance, resource utilization, channel condition, and fairness metrics. The server adopts the majority-preferred rule and retains it until the next vote, scheduled dynamically based on accuracy trends. Evaluated in over-the-air federated learning with explicit energy and resource cost modeling, synthetic and Fashion-MNIST experiments show that FedMaJ achieves competitive learning performance and superior aggregation-influence fairness. Under extreme-evaluation perturbations, Majority Judgment yields significantly more stable rule selections than mean-based scoring, establishing ordinal voting as a robust control layer for adaptive aggregation.