Evidence Hub

Towards Robust and Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning

Sana Awan

KU ScholarWorks (The University of Kansas), 2024

Abstract

Machine Learning (ML) has revolutionized various fields, from disease prediction to credit risk evaluation, by harnessing abundant data scattered across diverse sources. However, transporting data to a trusted server for centralized ML model training is not only costly but also raises privacy concerns, particularly with legislative standards like Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in place. In response to these challenges, Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a promising solution. FL involves training a collaborative model across a network of clients, each retaining its private data. By conducting training locally on the participating clients, this approach eliminates the need to transfer entire training datasets while harnessing their computation capabilities. However, FL introduces unique privacy risks, security concerns, and robustness challenges. Firstly, due to the statistical and system heterogeneity within FL, substantial differences exist between the distribution of each local dataset and the global distribution, causing clients’ local objectives to deviate greatly from the global optima, resulting in a drift in local updates. Secondly, FL is susceptible to malicious actors who may tamper with local data, manipulate the local training process, or intercept the shared model or gradients to implant backdoors that affect the robustness of the joint model. Addressing such vulnerabilities and challenges is crucial before deploying FL systems in…

Read the paper

Related studies

Go deeper in Evidence Hub

Evidence Hub adds a study data sheet (design, sample size, evidence level, key numbers), an AI summary and a chat grounded in the paper's text.

Open this study Sign up free