研究表格联邦学习中梯度反演攻击的隐私风险,发现模型架构影响数据泄露程度。
Profiling Privacy Preservation Against Gradient Inversion Attacks in Tabular Federated Learning

- 对比不同模型与配置,分析梯度反演对表格数据的隐私暴露
- 小客户端批次和稀疏更新最易被逆向重构,且重建准确率受数据稀疏性影响
- 推荐使用FT-Transformer等复杂架构,强调评估需结合精确匹配率
联邦学习(FL)允许多个数据持有者在不集中原始数据的情况下协同训练模型,适用于医疗等敏感领域。尽管数据保留在客户端,仅传输梯度或模型增量,但这些更新仍可能通过梯度反演攻击(GIAs)暴露私有信息。本文在诚实但好奇的服务器威胁模型下,针对多种FL协议、客户端批大小、训练阶段、攻击者假设、模型架构以及二分类、多分类和回归任务,评估表格型联邦学习中的隐私风险。采用MIMIC-IV及补充基准数据集,区分数值与类别特征恢复、基线可恢复性、特征级恢复和精确匹配率(EMR)。比较了FedSGD梯度与FedAvg模型增量,基于对齐协议,在匹配客户端数据暴露的前提下进行评估,而非通信轮次。对比MLP、ResNet与FT-Transformer模型,并通过在宽度、深度、激活函数、归一化和丢弃率上调整的MLP网格,分离架构影响。结果显示:小客户端批次和代表少数记录的更新最为脆弱;大本地批次和强聚合虽能降低重构程度,但无法消除泄漏。FT-Transformer始终比独热编码基线更难逆向,而同一MLP家族内部重构能力差异显著。这些发现表明模型架构是表格联邦学习中一个实际的隐私调控变量。此外,群体重建准确率可能夸大稀疏数据中完整记录的恢复程度,因此必须结合精确匹配率与基线对比。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Federated learning (FL) enables multiple data holders to train machine learning models collaboratively without centralizing raw data, making it useful in privacy sensitive domains such as healthcare and institutional data sharing. FL keeps data local to clients while communicating only model updates, such as gradients or model deltas. Nevertheless, these updates can expose private client data through gradient inversion attacks (GIAs). We study this risk for tabular FL under an honest-but-curious server threat model across FL protocols, client batch sizes, training stages, attacker assumptions, model architectures, and binary classification, multiclass classification, and regression tasks. We use MIMIC-IV and complementary benchmark datasets. Our evaluation distinguishes numerical and categorical recovery, baseline recoverability, feature level recovery, and exact match rate (EMR). We evaluate FedSGD gradients and FedAvg model deltas with an exposure aligned protocol, comparing attacked models after matched client data exposure rather than matched communication rounds. We compare multilayer perceptron (MLP), ResNet, and FT-Transformer models, and isolate architecture effects through an MLP grid over width, depth, activation, normalization, and dropout. The results show that small client batches and updates representing few distinct records are most vulnerable. Larger local batches and stronger aggregation reduce reconstruction but do not eliminate leakage. FT-Transformer is consistently harder to invert than one-hot baselines, while reconstructability also varies substantially within the MLP family. These findings identify architecture as a practical privacy variable in tabular FL. We also show that aggregate reconstruction accuracy can overstate complete record recovery in sparse data, making EMR and baseline comparisons essential.
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