Privacy-preserving gradient-based fair federated learning
This work addresses the need for fair and privacy-preserving federated learning, which is incremental as it builds upon existing approaches to improve usability for applications like control.
The paper tackles the problem of ensuring both collaborative fairness and privacy in federated learning, where participants' model quality depends on their data contribution without revealing gradients to a third party, achieving a scheme that exclusively uses local gradients to enhance usability.
Federated learning (FL) schemes allow multiple participants to collaboratively train neural networks without the need to directly share the underlying data.However, in early schemes, all participants eventually obtain the same model. Moreover, the aggregation is typically carried out by a third party, who obtains combined gradients or weights, which may reveal the model. These downsides underscore the demand for fair and privacy-preserving FL schemes. Here, collaborative fairness asks for individual model quality depending on the individual data contribution. Privacy is demanded with respect to any kind of data outsourced to the third party. Now, there already exist some approaches aiming for either fair or privacy-preserving FL and a few works even address both features. In our paper, we build upon these seminal works and present a novel, fair and privacy-preserving FL scheme. Our approach, which mainly relies on homomorphic encryption, stands out for exclusively using local gradients. This increases the usability in comparison to state-of-the-art approaches and thereby opens the door to applications in control.