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Federated learning (FL) is a distributed learning paradigm in which many clients with heterogeneous, unbalanced, and often sensitive local data, collaborate to learn a model. Local Differential Privacy (LDP) provides a strong guarantee that each clients data cannot be leaked during and after training, without relying on a trusted third party. While LDP is often believed to be too stringent to allow for satisfactory utility, our paper challenges this belief. We consider a general setup with unbalanced, heterogeneous data, disparate privacy needs across clients, and unreliable communication, where a random number/subset of clients is available each round. We propose three LDP algorithms for smooth (strongly) convex FL; each are noisy variations of distributed minibatch SGD. One is accelerated and one involves novel time-varying noise, which we use to obtain the first non-trivial LDP excess risk bound for the fully general non-i.i.d. FL problem. Specializing to i.i.d. clients, our risk bounds interpolate between the best known and/or optimal bounds in the centralized setting and the cross-device setting, where each client represents just one persons data. Furthermore, we show that in certain regimes, our convergence rate (nearly) matches the corresponding non-private lower bound or outperforms state of the art non-private algorithms (``privacy for free). Finally, we validate our theoretical results and illustrate the practical utility of our algorithm with numerical experiments.
This paper studies the relationship between generalization and privacy preservation in iterative learning algorithms by two sequential steps. We first establish an alignment between generalization and privacy preservation for any learning algorithm. We prove that $(varepsilon, delta)$-differential privacy implies an on-average generalization bound for multi-database learning algorithms which further leads to a high-probability bound for any learning algorithm. This high-probability bound also implies a PAC-learnable guarantee for differentially private learning algorithms. We then investigate how the iterative nature shared by most learning algorithms influence privacy preservation and further generalization. Three composition theorems are proposed to approximate the differential privacy of any iterative algorithm through the differential privacy of its every iteration. By integrating the above two steps, we eventually deliver generalization bounds for iterative learning algorithms, which suggest one can simultaneously enhance privacy preservation and generalization. Our results are strictly tighter than the existing works. Particularly, our generalization bounds do not rely on the model size which is prohibitively large in deep learning. This sheds light to understanding the generalizability of deep learning. These results apply to a wide spectrum of learning algorithms. In this paper, we apply them to stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics and agnostic federated learning as examples.
While rich medical datasets are hosted in hospitals distributed across the world, concerns on patients privacy is a barrier against using such data to train deep neural networks (DNNs) for medical diagnostics. We propose Dopamine, a system to train DNNs on distributed datasets, which employs federated learning (FL) with differentially-private stochastic gradient descent (DPSGD), and, in combination with secure aggregation, can establish a better trade-off between differential privacy (DP) guarantee and DNNs accuracy than other approaches. Results on a diabetic retinopathy~(DR) task show that Dopamine provides a DP guarantee close to the centralized training counterpart, while achieving a better classification accuracy than FL with parallel DP where DPSGD is applied without coordination. Code is available at https://github.com/ipc-lab/private-ml-for-health.
Federated Learning (FL) is a promising machine learning paradigm that enables the analyzer to train a model without collecting users raw data. To ensure users privacy, differentially private federated learning has been intensively studied. The existing works are mainly based on the textit{curator model} or textit{local model} of differential privacy. However, both of them have pros and cons. The curator model allows greater accuracy but requires a trusted analyzer. In the local model where users randomize local data before sending them to the analyzer, a trusted analyzer is not required but the accuracy is limited. In this work, by leveraging the textit{privacy amplification} effect in the recently proposed shuffle model of differential privacy, we achieve the best of two worlds, i.e., accuracy in the curator model and strong privacy without relying on any trusted party. We first propose an FL framework in the shuffle model and a simple protocol (SS-Simple) extended from existing work. We find that SS-Simple only provides an insufficient privacy amplification effect in FL since the dimension of the model parameter is quite large. To solve this challenge, we propose an enhanced protocol (SS-Double) to increase the privacy amplification effect by subsampling. Furthermore, for boosting the utility when the model size is greater than the user population, we propose an advanced protocol (SS-Topk) with gradient sparsification techniques. We also provide theoretical analysis and numerical evaluations of the privacy amplification of the proposed protocols. Experiments on real-world dataset validate that SS-Topk improves the testing accuracy by 60.7% than the local model based FL.
Neural architecture search, which aims to automatically search for architectures (e.g., convolution, max pooling) of neural networks that maximize validation performance, has achieved remarkable progress recently. In many application scenarios, several parties would like to collaboratively search for a shared neural architecture by leveraging data from all parties. However, due to privacy concerns, no party wants its data to be seen by other parties. To address this problem, we propose federated neural architecture search (FNAS), where different parties collectively search for a differentiable architecture by exchanging gradients of architecture variables without exposing their data to other parties. To further preserve privacy, we study differentially-private FNAS (DP-FNAS), which adds random noise to the gradients of architecture variables. We provide theoretical guarantees of DP-FNAS in achieving differential privacy. Experiments show that DP-FNAS can search highly-performant neural architectures while protecting the privacy of individual parties. The code is available at https://github.com/UCSD-AI4H/DP-FNAS
Differentially private (DP) machine learning allows us to train models on private data while limiting data leakage. DP formalizes this data leakage through a cryptographic game, where an adversary must predict if a model was trained on a dataset D, or a dataset D that differs in just one example.If observing the training algorithm does not meaningfully increase the adversarys odds of successfully guessing which dataset the model was trained on, then the algorithm is said to be differentially private. Hence, the purpose of privacy analysis is to upper bound the probability that any adversary could successfully guess which dataset the model was trained on.In our paper, we instantiate this hypothetical adversary in order to establish lower bounds on the probability that this distinguishing game can be won. We use this adversary to evaluate the importance of the adversary capabilities allowed in the privacy analysis of DP training algorithms.For DP-SGD, the most common method for training neural networks with differential privacy, our lower bounds are tight and match the theoretical upper bound. This implies that in order to prove better upper bounds, it will be necessary to make use of additional assumptions. Fortunately, we find that our attacks are significantly weaker when additional (realistic)restrictions are put in place on the adversarys capabilities.Thus, in the practical setting common to many real-world deployments, there is a gap between our lower bounds and the upper bounds provided by the analysis: differential privacy is conservative and adversaries may not be able to leak as much information as suggested by the theoretical bound.