Federated learning (FL) enables distributed agents to collaboratively learn a centralized model without sharing their raw data with each other. However, data locality does not provide sufficient privacy protection, and it is desirable to facilitate FL with rigorous differential privacy (DP) guarantee. Existing DP mechanisms would introduce random noise with magnitude proportional to the model size, which can be quite large in deep neural networks. In this paper, we propose a new FL framework with sparsification-amplified privacy. Our approach integrates random sparsification with gradient perturbation on each agent to amplify privacy guarantee. Since sparsification would increase the number of communication rounds required to achieve a certain target accuracy, which is unfavorable for DP guarantee, we further introduce acceleration techniques to help reduce the privacy cost. We rigorously analyze the convergence of our approach and utilize Renyi DP to tightly account the end-to-end DP guarantee. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets validate that our approach outperforms previous differentially-private FL approaches in both privacy guarantee and communication efficiency.
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SPriFed-OMP: A Differentially Private Federated Learning Algorithm for Sparse Basis Recovery
Sparse basis recovery is a classical and important statistical learning problem when the number of model dimensions p is much larger than the number of samples n. However, there has been little work that studies sparse basis recovery in the Federated Learning (FL) setting, where the client data’s differential privacy (DP) must also be simultaneously protected. In particular, the performance guarantees of existing DP-FL algorithms (such as DP-SGD) will degrade significantly when p >> n, and thus, they will fail to learn the true underlying sparse model accurately. In this work, we develop a new differentially private sparse basis recovery algorithm for the FL setting, called SPriFed-OMP. SPriFed-OMP converts OMP (Orthogonal Matching Pursuit) to the FL setting. Further, it combines SMPC (secure multi-party computation) and DP to ensure that only a small amount of noise needs to be added in order to achieve differential privacy. As a result, SPriFed-OMP can efficiently recover the true sparse basis for a linear model with only O(sqrt(p)) samples. We further present an enhanced version of our approach, SPriFed-OMP-GRAD based on gradient privatization, that improves the performance of SPriFed-OMP. Our theoretical analysis and empirical results demonstrate that both SPriFed-OMP and SPriFed-OMP-GRAD terminate in a small number of steps, and they significantly outperform the previous state-of-the-art DP-FL solutions in terms of the accuracy-privacy trade-off.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2225950
- PAR ID:
- 10539961
- Publisher / Repository:
- TMLR
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Nyssa
- Volume:
- 2024
- Issue:
- 6
- ISSN:
- 2835-8856
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1-49
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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