BDPFL: Backdoor Defense for Personalized Federated Learning via Explainable Distillation

Fuente: arXiv
Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Zhu, Chengcheng, Zhang, Jiale, Wu, Di, Long, Guodong
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
_version_ 1866918040866652160
author Zhu, Chengcheng
Zhang, Jiale
Wu, Di
Long, Guodong
author_facet Zhu, Chengcheng
Zhang, Jiale
Wu, Di
Long, Guodong
contents Federated learning is a distributed learning paradigm that facilitates the collaborative training of a global model across multiple clients while preserving the privacy of local datasets. To address inherent challenges related to data heterogeneity and satisfy personalized needs, a new direction within FL, known as personalized Federated Learning (pFL), has gradually evolved. Extensive attention has been directed toward developing novel frameworks and methods to enhance the performance of pFL. Regrettably, the aspect of security in pFL has been largely overlooked. Our objective is to fill this gap. Similar to FL, pFL is susceptible to backdoor attacks. However, existing backdoor defense strategies are primarily tailored to general FL frameworks, and pFL lacks robustness against backdoor attacks. We propose a novel, backdoor-robust pFL framework named BDPFL to address these challenges. First, BDPFL introduces layer-wise mutual distillation that enables clients to learn their personalized local models while mitigating potential backdoors. Then, BDPFL employs explanation heatmap to learn high-quality intermediate representations and enhance the effect of eliminating deeper and more entrenched backdoors. Moreover, we perform empirical evaluations of BDPFL's performance on three datasets and compare BDPFL with four backdoor defense methods. The experiments demonstrate that BDPFL outperforms baseline methods and is effective under various settings.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_06554
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle BDPFL: Backdoor Defense for Personalized Federated Learning via Explainable Distillation
Zhu, Chengcheng
Zhang, Jiale
Wu, Di
Long, Guodong
Cryptography and Security
Federated learning is a distributed learning paradigm that facilitates the collaborative training of a global model across multiple clients while preserving the privacy of local datasets. To address inherent challenges related to data heterogeneity and satisfy personalized needs, a new direction within FL, known as personalized Federated Learning (pFL), has gradually evolved. Extensive attention has been directed toward developing novel frameworks and methods to enhance the performance of pFL. Regrettably, the aspect of security in pFL has been largely overlooked. Our objective is to fill this gap. Similar to FL, pFL is susceptible to backdoor attacks. However, existing backdoor defense strategies are primarily tailored to general FL frameworks, and pFL lacks robustness against backdoor attacks. We propose a novel, backdoor-robust pFL framework named BDPFL to address these challenges. First, BDPFL introduces layer-wise mutual distillation that enables clients to learn their personalized local models while mitigating potential backdoors. Then, BDPFL employs explanation heatmap to learn high-quality intermediate representations and enhance the effect of eliminating deeper and more entrenched backdoors. Moreover, we perform empirical evaluations of BDPFL's performance on three datasets and compare BDPFL with four backdoor defense methods. The experiments demonstrate that BDPFL outperforms baseline methods and is effective under various settings.
title BDPFL: Backdoor Defense for Personalized Federated Learning via Explainable Distillation
topic Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.06554