Provable Privacy Advantages of Decentralized Federated Learning via Distributed Optimization

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Yu, Wenrui, Li, Qiongxiu, Lopuhaä-Zwakenberg, Milan, Christensen, Mads Græsbøll, Heusdens, Richard
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Yu, Wenrui
Li, Qiongxiu
Lopuhaä-Zwakenberg, Milan
Christensen, Mads Græsbøll
Heusdens, Richard
author_facet Yu, Wenrui
Li, Qiongxiu
Lopuhaä-Zwakenberg, Milan
Christensen, Mads Græsbøll
Heusdens, Richard
contents Federated learning (FL) emerged as a paradigm designed to improve data privacy by enabling data to reside at its source, thus embedding privacy as a core consideration in FL architectures, whether centralized or decentralized. Contrasting with recent findings by Pasquini et al., which suggest that decentralized FL does not empirically offer any additional privacy or security benefits over centralized models, our study provides compelling evidence to the contrary. We demonstrate that decentralized FL, when deploying distributed optimization, provides enhanced privacy protection - both theoretically and empirically - compared to centralized approaches. The challenge of quantifying privacy loss through iterative processes has traditionally constrained the theoretical exploration of FL protocols. We overcome this by conducting a pioneering in-depth information-theoretical privacy analysis for both frameworks. Our analysis, considering both eavesdropping and passive adversary models, successfully establishes bounds on privacy leakage. We show information theoretically that the privacy loss in decentralized FL is upper bounded by the loss in centralized FL. Compared to the centralized case where local gradients of individual participants are directly revealed, a key distinction of optimization-based decentralized FL is that the relevant information includes differences of local gradients over successive iterations and the aggregated sum of different nodes' gradients over the network. This information complicates the adversary's attempt to infer private data. To bridge our theoretical insights with practical applications, we present detailed case studies involving logistic regression and deep neural networks. These examples demonstrate that while privacy leakage remains comparable in simpler models, complex models like deep neural networks exhibit lower privacy risks under decentralized FL.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_09324
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Provable Privacy Advantages of Decentralized Federated Learning via Distributed Optimization
Yu, Wenrui
Li, Qiongxiu
Lopuhaä-Zwakenberg, Milan
Christensen, Mads Græsbøll
Heusdens, Richard
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Information Theory
Federated learning (FL) emerged as a paradigm designed to improve data privacy by enabling data to reside at its source, thus embedding privacy as a core consideration in FL architectures, whether centralized or decentralized. Contrasting with recent findings by Pasquini et al., which suggest that decentralized FL does not empirically offer any additional privacy or security benefits over centralized models, our study provides compelling evidence to the contrary. We demonstrate that decentralized FL, when deploying distributed optimization, provides enhanced privacy protection - both theoretically and empirically - compared to centralized approaches. The challenge of quantifying privacy loss through iterative processes has traditionally constrained the theoretical exploration of FL protocols. We overcome this by conducting a pioneering in-depth information-theoretical privacy analysis for both frameworks. Our analysis, considering both eavesdropping and passive adversary models, successfully establishes bounds on privacy leakage. We show information theoretically that the privacy loss in decentralized FL is upper bounded by the loss in centralized FL. Compared to the centralized case where local gradients of individual participants are directly revealed, a key distinction of optimization-based decentralized FL is that the relevant information includes differences of local gradients over successive iterations and the aggregated sum of different nodes' gradients over the network. This information complicates the adversary's attempt to infer private data. To bridge our theoretical insights with practical applications, we present detailed case studies involving logistic regression and deep neural networks. These examples demonstrate that while privacy leakage remains comparable in simpler models, complex models like deep neural networks exhibit lower privacy risks under decentralized FL.
title Provable Privacy Advantages of Decentralized Federated Learning via Distributed Optimization
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Information Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.09324