TS-Inverse: A Gradient Inversion Attack Tailored for Federated Time Series Forecasting Models

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Main Authors: Meijer, Caspar, Huang, Jiyue, Sharma, Shreshtha, Lazovik, Elena, Chen, Lydia Y.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Meijer, Caspar
Huang, Jiyue
Sharma, Shreshtha
Lazovik, Elena
Chen, Lydia Y.
author_facet Meijer, Caspar
Huang, Jiyue
Sharma, Shreshtha
Lazovik, Elena
Chen, Lydia Y.
contents Federated learning (FL) for time series forecasting (TSF) enables clients with privacy-sensitive time series (TS) data to collaboratively learn accurate forecasting models, for example, in energy load prediction. Unfortunately, privacy risks in FL persist, as servers can potentially reconstruct clients' training data through gradient inversion attacks (GIA). Although GIA is demonstrated for image classification tasks, little is known about time series regression tasks. In this paper, we first conduct an extensive empirical study on inverting TS data across 4 TSF models and 4 datasets, identifying the unique challenges of reconstructing both observations and targets of TS data. We then propose TS-Inverse, a novel GIA that improves the inversion of TS data by (i) learning a gradient inversion model that outputs quantile predictions, (ii) a unique loss function that incorporates periodicity and trend regularization, and (iii) regularization according to the quantile predictions. Our evaluations demonstrate a remarkable performance of TS-Inverse, achieving at least a 2x-10x improvement in terms of the sMAPE metric over existing GIA methods on TS data. Code repository: https://github.com/Capsar/ts-inverse
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_20952
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle TS-Inverse: A Gradient Inversion Attack Tailored for Federated Time Series Forecasting Models
Meijer, Caspar
Huang, Jiyue
Sharma, Shreshtha
Lazovik, Elena
Chen, Lydia Y.
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Federated learning (FL) for time series forecasting (TSF) enables clients with privacy-sensitive time series (TS) data to collaboratively learn accurate forecasting models, for example, in energy load prediction. Unfortunately, privacy risks in FL persist, as servers can potentially reconstruct clients' training data through gradient inversion attacks (GIA). Although GIA is demonstrated for image classification tasks, little is known about time series regression tasks. In this paper, we first conduct an extensive empirical study on inverting TS data across 4 TSF models and 4 datasets, identifying the unique challenges of reconstructing both observations and targets of TS data. We then propose TS-Inverse, a novel GIA that improves the inversion of TS data by (i) learning a gradient inversion model that outputs quantile predictions, (ii) a unique loss function that incorporates periodicity and trend regularization, and (iii) regularization according to the quantile predictions. Our evaluations demonstrate a remarkable performance of TS-Inverse, achieving at least a 2x-10x improvement in terms of the sMAPE metric over existing GIA methods on TS data. Code repository: https://github.com/Capsar/ts-inverse
title TS-Inverse: A Gradient Inversion Attack Tailored for Federated Time Series Forecasting Models
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.20952