Private and Robust Contribution Evaluation in Federated Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Velez, Delio Jaramillo, Biczok, Gergely, Amat, Alexandre Graell i, Ostman, Johan, Pejo, Balazs
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Velez, Delio Jaramillo
Biczok, Gergely
Amat, Alexandre Graell i
Ostman, Johan
Pejo, Balazs
author_facet Velez, Delio Jaramillo
Biczok, Gergely
Amat, Alexandre Graell i
Ostman, Johan
Pejo, Balazs
contents Cross-silo federated learning allows multiple organizations to collaboratively train machine learning models without sharing raw data, but client updates can still leak sensitive information through inference attacks. Secure aggregation protects privacy by hiding individual updates, yet it complicates contribution evaluation, which is critical for fair rewards and detecting low-quality or malicious participants. Existing marginal-contribution methods, such as the Shapley value, are incompatible with secure aggregation, and practical alternatives, such as Leave-One-Out, are crude and rely on self-evaluation. We introduce two marginal-difference contribution scores compatible with secure aggregation. Fair-Private satisfies standard fairness axioms, while Everybody-Else eliminates self-evaluation and provides resistance to manipulation, addressing a largely overlooked vulnerability. We provide theoretical guarantees for fairness, privacy, robustness, and computational efficiency, and evaluate our methods on multiple medical image datasets and CIFAR10 in cross-silo settings. Our scores consistently outperform existing baselines, better approximate Shapley-induced client rankings, and improve downstream model performance as well as misbehavior detection. These results demonstrate that fairness, privacy, robustness, and practical utility can be achieved jointly in federated contribution evaluation, offering a principled solution for real-world cross-silo deployments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_21721
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Private and Robust Contribution Evaluation in Federated Learning
Velez, Delio Jaramillo
Biczok, Gergely
Amat, Alexandre Graell i
Ostman, Johan
Pejo, Balazs
Cryptography and Security
Computer Science and Game Theory
Machine Learning
Cross-silo federated learning allows multiple organizations to collaboratively train machine learning models without sharing raw data, but client updates can still leak sensitive information through inference attacks. Secure aggregation protects privacy by hiding individual updates, yet it complicates contribution evaluation, which is critical for fair rewards and detecting low-quality or malicious participants. Existing marginal-contribution methods, such as the Shapley value, are incompatible with secure aggregation, and practical alternatives, such as Leave-One-Out, are crude and rely on self-evaluation. We introduce two marginal-difference contribution scores compatible with secure aggregation. Fair-Private satisfies standard fairness axioms, while Everybody-Else eliminates self-evaluation and provides resistance to manipulation, addressing a largely overlooked vulnerability. We provide theoretical guarantees for fairness, privacy, robustness, and computational efficiency, and evaluate our methods on multiple medical image datasets and CIFAR10 in cross-silo settings. Our scores consistently outperform existing baselines, better approximate Shapley-induced client rankings, and improve downstream model performance as well as misbehavior detection. These results demonstrate that fairness, privacy, robustness, and practical utility can be achieved jointly in federated contribution evaluation, offering a principled solution for real-world cross-silo deployments.
title Private and Robust Contribution Evaluation in Federated Learning
topic Cryptography and Security
Computer Science and Game Theory
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.21721