Federated Learning with Differential Privacy: An Utility-Enhanced Approach

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Ranaweera, Kanishka, Nguyen, Dinh C., Pathirana, Pubudu N., Smith, David, Ding, Ming, Rakotoarivelo, Thierry, Seneviratne, Aruna
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Ranaweera, Kanishka
Nguyen, Dinh C.
Pathirana, Pubudu N.
Smith, David
Ding, Ming
Rakotoarivelo, Thierry
Seneviratne, Aruna
author_facet Ranaweera, Kanishka
Nguyen, Dinh C.
Pathirana, Pubudu N.
Smith, David
Ding, Ming
Rakotoarivelo, Thierry
Seneviratne, Aruna
contents Federated learning has emerged as an attractive approach to protect data privacy by eliminating the need for sharing clients' data while reducing communication costs compared with centralized machine learning algorithms. However, recent studies have shown that federated learning alone does not guarantee privacy, as private data may still be inferred from the uploaded parameters to the central server. In order to successfully avoid data leakage, adopting differential privacy (DP) in the local optimization process or in the local update aggregation process has emerged as two feasible ways for achieving sample-level or user-level privacy guarantees respectively, in federated learning models. However, compared to their non-private equivalents, these approaches suffer from a poor utility. To improve the privacy-utility trade-off, we present a modification to these vanilla differentially private algorithms based on a Haar wavelet transformation step and a novel noise injection scheme that significantly lowers the asymptotic bound of the noise variance. We also present a holistic convergence analysis of our proposed algorithm, showing that our method yields better convergence performance than the vanilla DP algorithms. Numerical experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches in model utility while maintaining the same privacy guarantees.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_21154
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Federated Learning with Differential Privacy: An Utility-Enhanced Approach
Ranaweera, Kanishka
Nguyen, Dinh C.
Pathirana, Pubudu N.
Smith, David
Ding, Ming
Rakotoarivelo, Thierry
Seneviratne, Aruna
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Federated learning has emerged as an attractive approach to protect data privacy by eliminating the need for sharing clients' data while reducing communication costs compared with centralized machine learning algorithms. However, recent studies have shown that federated learning alone does not guarantee privacy, as private data may still be inferred from the uploaded parameters to the central server. In order to successfully avoid data leakage, adopting differential privacy (DP) in the local optimization process or in the local update aggregation process has emerged as two feasible ways for achieving sample-level or user-level privacy guarantees respectively, in federated learning models. However, compared to their non-private equivalents, these approaches suffer from a poor utility. To improve the privacy-utility trade-off, we present a modification to these vanilla differentially private algorithms based on a Haar wavelet transformation step and a novel noise injection scheme that significantly lowers the asymptotic bound of the noise variance. We also present a holistic convergence analysis of our proposed algorithm, showing that our method yields better convergence performance than the vanilla DP algorithms. Numerical experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches in model utility while maintaining the same privacy guarantees.
title Federated Learning with Differential Privacy: An Utility-Enhanced Approach
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.21154