PRIVEE: Privacy-Preserving Vertical Federated Learning Against Feature Inference Attacks

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Madabushi, Sindhuja, Khan, Ahmad Faraz, Ali, Haider, Swami, Ananthram, Ning, Rui, Wu, Hongyi, Cho, Jin-Hee
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866911318719594496
author Madabushi, Sindhuja
Khan, Ahmad Faraz
Ali, Haider
Swami, Ananthram
Ning, Rui
Wu, Hongyi
Cho, Jin-Hee
author_facet Madabushi, Sindhuja
Khan, Ahmad Faraz
Ali, Haider
Swami, Ananthram
Ning, Rui
Wu, Hongyi
Cho, Jin-Hee
contents Vertical Federated Learning (VFL) enables collaborative model training across organizations that share common user samples but hold disjoint feature spaces. Despite its potential, VFL is susceptible to feature inference attacks, in which adversarial parties exploit shared confidence scores (i.e., prediction probabilities) during inference to reconstruct private input features of other participants. To counter this threat, we propose PRIVEE (PRIvacy-preserving Vertical fEderated lEarning), a novel defense mechanism named after the French word privée, meaning "private." PRIVEE obfuscates confidence scores while preserving critical properties such as relative ranking and inter-score distances. Rather than exposing raw scores, PRIVEE shares only the transformed representations, mitigating the risk of reconstruction attacks without degrading model prediction accuracy. Extensive experiments show that PRIVEE achieves a threefold improvement in privacy protection compared to state-of-the-art defenses, while preserving full predictive performance against advanced feature inference attacks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_12840
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle PRIVEE: Privacy-Preserving Vertical Federated Learning Against Feature Inference Attacks
Madabushi, Sindhuja
Khan, Ahmad Faraz
Ali, Haider
Swami, Ananthram
Ning, Rui
Wu, Hongyi
Cho, Jin-Hee
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Vertical Federated Learning (VFL) enables collaborative model training across organizations that share common user samples but hold disjoint feature spaces. Despite its potential, VFL is susceptible to feature inference attacks, in which adversarial parties exploit shared confidence scores (i.e., prediction probabilities) during inference to reconstruct private input features of other participants. To counter this threat, we propose PRIVEE (PRIvacy-preserving Vertical fEderated lEarning), a novel defense mechanism named after the French word privée, meaning "private." PRIVEE obfuscates confidence scores while preserving critical properties such as relative ranking and inter-score distances. Rather than exposing raw scores, PRIVEE shares only the transformed representations, mitigating the risk of reconstruction attacks without degrading model prediction accuracy. Extensive experiments show that PRIVEE achieves a threefold improvement in privacy protection compared to state-of-the-art defenses, while preserving full predictive performance against advanced feature inference attacks.
title PRIVEE: Privacy-Preserving Vertical Federated Learning Against Feature Inference Attacks
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.12840