arXiv:2605.06596cs.CRcs.LG2026-05

提出隐私保护的客户端水印溯源方法,实现联邦微调中谁用了水印数据的精准追踪。

FedAttr: Towards Privacy-preserving Client-Level Attribution in Federated LLM Fine-tuning

  • 通过差分查询与差分评分,从安全聚合中推断各客户端更新。
  • 实测100%检出率、零误报率,性能优于基线至少44.4%或19.1%。
  • 兼顾隐私保护与计算开销,仅增加6.3%训练时间,适合实际部署。

水印检测类方法可判断模型是否在水印文档上训练,已成为大语言模型微调中保护数据所有权的关键工具。现有工作在集中式微调中已验证有效性,但在联邦学习(FL)场景下仍面临挑战,因主流的私有化机制——安全聚合(SA)虽保障隐私,却难以识别哪些客户端使用了水印数据。本文提出FedAttr,一种新的客户端级溯源协议。它通过三步实现:(i) 通过两次安全聚合查询差分估算客户端更新;(ii) 用差分评分法结合水印检测器打分;(iii) 采用Stouffer方法跨轮次融合得分。理论上,FedAttr提供无偏更新估计,且每轮泄露互信息不超过 $O(d^*/N)$。实验表明,其达到100%真正例率(TPR)和0%假正例率(FPR),在TPR上优于基线至少44.4%,在FPR上优于基线至少19.1%,训练开销仅增加6.3%。消融实验显示其对参数配置鲁棒。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Watermark radioactivity testing type of methods can detect whether a model was trained on watermarked documents, and have become key tools for protecting data ownership in the fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs). Existing works have proved their effectiveness in centralized LLM fine-tuning. However, this type of method faces several challenges and remains underexplored in federated learning (FL), a widely-applied paradigm for fine-tuning LLMs collaboratively on private data across different users. FL mainly ensures privacy through secure aggregation (SA), which allows the server to aggregate updates while keeping clients' updates private. This mechanism preserves privacy but makes it difficult to identify which client trained on watermarked documents. In this work, we propose FedAttr, a new client-level attribution protocol for FL. FedAttr identifies which clients trained on watermarked data via a paired-subset-difference mechanism, while preserving the privacy guarantees of SA and FL performance. FedAttr proceeds in three steps: (i) estimate each client's update by differencing two SA queries, (ii) score the estimate with the watermark detector via differential scoring, and (iii) combine scores across rounds via Stouffer method. We theoretically show that FedAttr produces an unbiased estimator of each client's update with bounded mutual information leakage (i.e., $O(d^*/N)$ per-round update). Moreover, FedAttr empirically achieves 100% TPR and 0% FPR, outperforming all baselines by at least 44.4% in TPR or 19.1% in FPR, with only 6.3% overhead relative to FL training time. Ablation studies confirm that FedAttr is robust to protocol parameters and configurations.

联邦学习水印溯源隐私保护大模型微调

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