提出Gradient Mirage防御,让大模型分层训练中的梯度不可逆推标签。
Gradient Mirage: Trainable yet Label-Unidentifiable Gradients in Large Language Model Split Learning

- 用掩码损失生成梯度,打破梯度与真实目标的一致性。
- 随机缩放梯度尺度,使攻击者无法还原真实梯度大小。
- 方向扰动+隐私保护机制,兼顾隐私与模型性能。
大型语言模型分层训练中的梯度匹配攻击(GMAs)依赖于一个关键但未被充分研究的假设:分割接口暴露的梯度是客户端完整标签训练目标的真实导数。这一一致性使服务器可通过搜索序列来恢复私有标签。本文提出梯度幻象(Gradient Mirage)防御机制,通过破坏梯度与目标之间的对应关系,在不牺牲优化效用的前提下实现强防护。核心思想是诱导攻击者求解一个错误设定的逆问题——在序列空间中不存在任何合理标签序列能解释观测到的梯度。具体通过三个维度实现:目标(使用掩码代理损失替代完整标签目标)、方向(基于vMF分布随机化梯度方向,满足方向差分隐私)、尺度(引入随机乘法缩放,隐藏梯度自然量级)。关键在于,模型仍可正常训练:顶部段通过双轨反向传播学习所有目标词,暴露梯度因保留自回归上下文而保持信息量,底部梯度恢复机制确保底层优化的有效梯度可用。大量实验表明,该方法在相近微调性能下显著优于现有防御,实现了更优的隐私-效用权衡。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Gradient matching attacks (GMAs) in LLM split learning (SL) rely on a critical yet underexplored assumption: the gradient exposed at the split interface is a faithful derivative of the client's full-label training objective. This gradient-objective consistency allows a curious server to recover private labels by searching for a sequence whose induced gradient explains the observation. We propose Gradient Mirage, a defense that breaks this consistency without discarding the optimization utility of the backward signal. Our key idea is to induce the adversary to solve a misspecified inverse problem, in which no plausible label sequence in the sequence space can explain the observed gradients. Concretely, Gradient Mirage achieves this by inducing inconsistency across three dimensions: objective, direction, and scale. Selective Autoregressive Supervision derives the exposed gradient from a masked surrogate loss rather than the full-label objective assumed by the attacker; Scale Blinding then applies randomized multiplicative rescaling, obscuring the gradient's natural magnitude; and Directional Privatization further randomizes the gradient direction while preserving its magnitude through the von Mises-Fisher (vMF) mechanism under a directional metric differential privacy guarantee. Crucially, utility is preserved: the Top segment still learns from all target tokens via Dual-Track Backpropagation, the exposed gradient remains informative since each supervised token retains its complete autoregressive context, and Bottom-Gradient Recovery restores the effective gradient for Bottom-segment optimization. Extensive experiments show that Gradient Mirage provides substantially stronger protection than existing defenses under comparable fine-tuning performance, achieving a better privacy-utility trade-off.
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