Deep Leakage with Generative Flow Matching Denoiser

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Baglin, Isaac, Zhu, Xiatian, Hadfield, Simon
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Baglin, Isaac
Zhu, Xiatian
Hadfield, Simon
author_facet Baglin, Isaac
Zhu, Xiatian
Hadfield, Simon
contents Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for decentralized model training, yet it remains vulnerable to deep leakage (DL) attacks that reconstruct private client data from shared model updates. While prior DL methods have demonstrated varying levels of success, they often suffer from instability, limited fidelity, or poor robustness under realistic FL settings. We introduce a new DL attack that integrates a generative Flow Matching (FM) prior into the reconstruction process. By guiding optimization toward the distribution of realistic images (represented by a flow matching foundation model), our method enhances reconstruction fidelity without requiring knowledge of the private data. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets and target models demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art attacks across pixel-level, perceptual, and feature-based similarity metrics. Crucially, the method remains effective across different training epochs, larger client batch sizes, and under common defenses such as noise injection, clipping, and sparsification. Our findings call for the development of new defense strategies that explicitly account for adversaries equipped with powerful generative priors.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_15049
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Deep Leakage with Generative Flow Matching Denoiser
Baglin, Isaac
Zhu, Xiatian
Hadfield, Simon
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for decentralized model training, yet it remains vulnerable to deep leakage (DL) attacks that reconstruct private client data from shared model updates. While prior DL methods have demonstrated varying levels of success, they often suffer from instability, limited fidelity, or poor robustness under realistic FL settings. We introduce a new DL attack that integrates a generative Flow Matching (FM) prior into the reconstruction process. By guiding optimization toward the distribution of realistic images (represented by a flow matching foundation model), our method enhances reconstruction fidelity without requiring knowledge of the private data. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets and target models demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art attacks across pixel-level, perceptual, and feature-based similarity metrics. Crucially, the method remains effective across different training epochs, larger client batch sizes, and under common defenses such as noise injection, clipping, and sparsification. Our findings call for the development of new defense strategies that explicitly account for adversaries equipped with powerful generative priors.
title Deep Leakage with Generative Flow Matching Denoiser
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15049