在强隐私保护下,用引力场拓扑分析实现无通信的联邦聚类。
Topological Federated Clustering via Gravitational Potential Fields under Local Differential Privacy
- 将客户端聚类中心转为引力势场,通过拓扑分析提取稳定聚类中心。
- 在ε<1强隐私约束下,聚类准确率显著优于现有方法。
- 适合需要高隐私、低通信开销的分布式数据聚类场景。
在联邦学习中,对非独立同分布(non-IID)数据进行本地差分隐私(LDP)下的聚类面临严峻挑战:如何在不依赖迭代通信的情况下兼顾隐私与精度。现有的一次性方法依赖不稳定的成对中心距或邻域排序,在强LDP噪声和数据异质性下性能急剧下降。本文提出引力联邦聚类(GFC),通过将私有化客户端中心转化为全局引力势场,使真实聚类中心作为拓扑持久奇点自然浮现。框架引入两项创新:(1) 客户端侧的紧凑性感知扰动机制,将局部聚类几何编码为“质量”值;(2) 服务端侧的拓扑聚合阶段,通过对势场超水平集进行持续同调分析提取稳定中心。理论上,我们建立了隐私预算ε与中心估计误差之间的闭式边界,证明势场的Lipschitz平滑特性可指数抑制高密度区域的噪声。实验上,GFC在十个基准测试中均优于当前最优方法,尤其在强隐私约束(ε<1)下表现突出,且在低隐私预算下性能相当。通过将联邦聚类重构为合成物理空间中的拓扑持久性问题,GFC实现了无需迭代通信的前所未有的隐私-精度权衡,为隐私保护分布式学习提供了新视角。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Clustering non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) data under local differential privacy (LDP) in federated settings presents a critical challenge: preserving privacy while maintaining accuracy without iterative communication. Existing one-shot methods rely on unstable pairwise centroid distances or neighborhood rankings, degrading severely under strong LDP noise and data heterogeneity. We present Gravitational Federated Clustering (GFC), a novel approach to privacy-preserving federated clustering that overcomes the limitations of distance-based methods under varying LDP. Addressing the critical challenge of clustering non-IID data with diverse privacy guarantees, GFC transforms privatized client centroids into a global gravitational potential field where true cluster centers emerge as topologically persistent singularities. Our framework introduces two key innovations: (1) a client-side compactness-aware perturbation mechanism that encodes local cluster geometry as "mass" values, and (2) a server-side topological aggregation phase that extracts stable centroids through persistent homology analysis of the potential field's superlevel sets. Theoretically, we establish a closed-form bound between the privacy budget $ε$ and centroid estimation error, proving the potential field's Lipschitz smoothing properties exponentially suppress noise in high-density regions. Empirically, GFC outperforms state-of-the-art methods on ten benchmarks, especially under strong LDP constraints ($ε< 1$), while maintaining comparable performance at lower privacy budgets. By reformulating federated clustering as a topological persistence problem in a synthetic physics-inspired space, GFC achieves unprecedented privacy-accuracy trade-offs without iterative communication, providing a new perspective for privacy-preserving distributed learning.
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