Statistical Limits and Efficient Algorithms for Differentially Private Federated Learning

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Auddy, Arnab, Peng, Xiangni, Paul, Subhadeep
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866917508371447808
author Auddy, Arnab
Peng, Xiangni
Paul, Subhadeep
author_facet Auddy, Arnab
Peng, Xiangni
Paul, Subhadeep
contents Federated Learning is a leading framework for training ML and AI models collaboratively across numerous user devices or databases. We study the trade-offs among estimation accuracy, privacy constraints, and communication cost for differentially private (DP) federated M estimation. The two standard methods in the literature are FedAvg, which may suffer from high federation bias, and FedSGD, which can incur high communication cost. Aimed at improving accuracy at a reduced communication cost, we propose FedHybrid, which uses FedSGD starting with an improved initialization by the FedAvg estimator. We propose FedNewton, which averages local Newton iterations to reduce bias in FedAvg, achieving an estimation accuracy comparable to FedSGD with much fewer communication rounds when the number of clients grows sufficiently slowly. We establish finite sample upper bounds on the mean-squared error rates of the DP versions of these estimators as functions of the number of clients, local sample sizes, privacy budget, and number of iterations. We further derive a minimax lower bound on the MSE of any iterative private federated procedure that provides a benchmark to assess the optimality gap of these methods. We numerically evaluate our methods for training a logistic regression and a neural network on the computer vision datasets MNIST and CIFAR-10.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_18656
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Statistical Limits and Efficient Algorithms for Differentially Private Federated Learning
Auddy, Arnab
Peng, Xiangni
Paul, Subhadeep
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Methodology
Federated Learning is a leading framework for training ML and AI models collaboratively across numerous user devices or databases. We study the trade-offs among estimation accuracy, privacy constraints, and communication cost for differentially private (DP) federated M estimation. The two standard methods in the literature are FedAvg, which may suffer from high federation bias, and FedSGD, which can incur high communication cost. Aimed at improving accuracy at a reduced communication cost, we propose FedHybrid, which uses FedSGD starting with an improved initialization by the FedAvg estimator. We propose FedNewton, which averages local Newton iterations to reduce bias in FedAvg, achieving an estimation accuracy comparable to FedSGD with much fewer communication rounds when the number of clients grows sufficiently slowly. We establish finite sample upper bounds on the mean-squared error rates of the DP versions of these estimators as functions of the number of clients, local sample sizes, privacy budget, and number of iterations. We further derive a minimax lower bound on the MSE of any iterative private federated procedure that provides a benchmark to assess the optimality gap of these methods. We numerically evaluate our methods for training a logistic regression and a neural network on the computer vision datasets MNIST and CIFAR-10.
title Statistical Limits and Efficient Algorithms for Differentially Private Federated Learning
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Methodology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.18656