Minimal Model Structure Analysis for Input Reconstruction in Federated Learning
This work addresses privacy vulnerabilities in federated learning for users, though it is incremental as it builds on prior reconstruction attacks.
The paper tackles the problem of input data reconstruction from gradients in federated learning, showing that a single input can be reconstructed analytically with a fully-connected neural network having one hidden node, and generalizing this to batch reconstruction under certain conditions, with validation on biomedical and benchmark datasets.
\ac{fl} proposed a distributed \ac{ml} framework where every distributed worker owns a complete copy of global model and their own data. The training is occurred locally, which assures no direct transmission of training data. However, the recent work \citep{zhu2019deep} demonstrated that input data from a neural network may be reconstructed only using knowledge of gradients of that network, which completely breached the promise of \ac{fl} and sabotaged the user privacy. In this work, we aim to further explore the theoretical limits of reconstruction, speedup and stabilize the reconstruction procedure. We show that a single input may be reconstructed with the analytical form, regardless of network depth using a fully-connected neural network with one hidden node. Then we generalize this result to a gradient averaged over batches of size $B$. In this case, the full batch can be reconstructed if the number of hidden units exceeds $B$. For a \ac{cnn}, the number of required kernels in convolutional layers is decided by multiple factors, e.g., padding, kernel and stride size, etc. We require the number of kernels $h\geq (\frac{d}{d^{\prime}})^2C$, where we define $d$ as input width, $d^{\prime}$ as output width after convolutional layer, and $C$ as channel number of input. We validate our observation and demonstrate the improvements using bio-medical (fMRI, \ac{wbc}) and benchmark data (MNIST, Kuzushiji-MNIST, CIFAR100, ImageNet and face images).