Okko Makkonen

Okko Makkonen, Sampo Niemelä, Camilla Hollanti et al.

This work focuses on the challenges of non-IID data and stragglers/dropouts in federated learning. We introduce and explore a privacy-flexible paradigm that models parts of the clients' local data as non-private, offering a more versatile and business-oriented perspective on privacy. Within this framework, we propose a data-driven strategy for mitigating the effects of label heterogeneity and client straggling on federated learning. Our solution combines both offline data sharing and approximate gradient coding techniques. Through numerical simulations using the MNIST dataset, we demonstrate that our approach enables achieving a deliberate trade-off between privacy and utility, leading to improved model convergence and accuracy while using an adaptable portion of non-private data.

Okko Makkonen, Camilla Hollanti

This work considers the problem of distributing matrix multiplication over the real or complex numbers to helper servers, such that the information leakage to these servers is close to being information-theoretically secure. These servers are assumed to be honest-but-curious, i.e., they work according to the protocol, but try to deduce information about the data. The problem of secure distributed matrix multiplication (SDMM) has been considered in the context of matrix multiplication over finite fields, which is not always feasible in real world applications. We present two schemes, which allow for variable degree of security based on the use case and allow for colluding and straggling servers. We analyze the security and the numerical accuracy of the schemes and observe a trade-off between accuracy and security.