Federated Learning with Local Differential Privacy: Trade-Offs between Privacy, Utility, and Communication

Research output: Contribution to book/Conference proceedings/Anthology/ReportConference contributionContributedpeer-review

Contributors

  • Muah Kim - , Technical University of Berlin (Author)
  • Onur Günlü - , Technical University of Berlin (Author)
  • Rafael F. Schaefer - , University of Siegen (Author)

Abstract

Federated learning (FL) allows to train a massive amount of data privately due to its decentralized structure. Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is commonly used for FL due to its good empirical performance, but sensitive user information can still be inferred from weight updates shared during FL iterations. We consider Gaussian mechanisms to preserve local differential privacy (LDP) of user data in the FL model with SGD. The trade-offs between user privacy, global utility, and transmission rate are proved by defining appropriate metrics for FL with LDP. Compared to existing results, the query sensitivity used in LDP is defined as a variable, and a tighter privacy accounting method is applied. The proposed utility bound allows heterogeneous parameters over all users. Our bounds characterize how much utility decreases and transmission rate increases if a stronger privacy regime is targeted. Furthermore, given a target privacy level, our results guarantee a significantly larger utility and a smaller transmission rate as compared to existing privacy accounting methods.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationICASSP 2021 - 2021 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP)
Pages2650-2654
Number of pages5
ISBN (electronic)978-1-7281-7605-5
Publication statusPublished - 2021
Peer-reviewedYes
Externally publishedYes

Publication series

SeriesInternational Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP)
ISSN1520-6149

Conference

Title2021 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, ICASSP 2021
Duration6 - 11 June 2021
CityVirtual, Toronto
CountryCanada

External IDs

ORCID /0000-0002-1702-9075/work/165878299

Keywords

Keywords

  • Composition theorems, Federated learning (fl), Gaussian randomization, Local differential privacy (ldp), Stochastic gradient descent (sgd)