<p>The swift emergence and wide-ranging utilization of machine learning (ML) across various industries, including healthcare, transportation, and robotics, have underscored the escalating need for efficient, scalable, and privacy-preserving solutions. Recognizing this, we present an integrated examination of three novel frameworks, each addressing different aspects of distributed learning and privacy issues: Two Timescale Hybrid Federated Learning (TT-HF), Delay-Aware Federated Learning (DFL), and Differential Privacy Hierarchical Federated Learning (DP-HFL). TT-HF introduces a semi-decentralized architecture that combines device-to-server and device-to-device (D2D) communications. Devices execute multiple stochastic gradient descent iterations on their datasets and sporadically synchronize model parameters via D2D communications. A unique adaptive control algorithm optimizes step size, D2D communication rounds, and global aggregation period to minimize network resource utilization and achieve a sublinear convergence rate. TT-HF outperforms conventional FL approaches in terms of model accuracy, energy consumption, and resilience against outages. DFL focuses on enhancing distributed ML training efficiency by accounting for communication delays between edge and cloud. It also uses multiple stochastic gradient descent iterations and periodically consolidates model parameters via edge servers. The adaptive control algorithm for DFL mitigates energy consumption and edge-to-cloud latency, resulting in faster global model convergence, reduced resource consumption, and robustness against delays. Lastly, DP-HFL is introduced to combat privacy vulnerabilities in FL. Merging the benefits of FL and Hierarchical Differential Privacy (HDP), DP-HFL significantly reduces the need for differential privacy noise while maintaining model performance, exhibiting an optimal privacy-performance trade-off. Theoretical analysis under both convex and nonconvex loss functions confirms DP-HFL’s effectiveness regarding convergence speed, privacy performance trade-off, and potential performance enhancement with appropriate network configuration. In sum, the study thoroughly explores TT-HF, DFL, and DP-HFL, and their unique solutions to distributed learning challenges such as efficiency, latency, and privacy concerns. These advanced FL frameworks have considerable potential to further enable effective, efficient, and secure distributed learning.</p>