{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/decepticons-corrupted-transformers-breach","title":"Decepticons: Corrupted Transformers Breach Privacy in Federated Learning for Language Models","arxiv_id":"2201.12675","date":"2022-01-29","proceeding":null,"authors":["Liam Fowl","Jonas Geiping","Steven Reich","Yuxin Wen","Wojtek Czaja","Micah Goldblum","Tom Goldstein"],"abstract":"A central tenet of Federated learning (FL), which trains models without centralizing user data, is privacy. However, previous work has shown that the gradient updates used in FL can leak user information. While the most industrial uses of FL are for text applications (e.g. keystroke prediction), nearly all attacks on FL privacy have focused on simple image classifiers. We propose a novel attack that reveals private user text by deploying malicious parameter vectors, and which succeeds even with mini-batches, multiple users, and long sequences. Unlike previous attacks on FL, the attack exploits characteristics of both the Transformer architecture and the token embedding, separately extracting tokens and positional embeddings to retrieve high-fidelity text. This work suggests that FL on text, which has historically been resistant to privacy attacks, is far more vulnerable than previously thought.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.12675v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.12675v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"decepticons-corrupted-transformers-breach","repo_url":"https://github.com/JonasGeiping/breaching","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"federated-learning","task_name":"Federated Learning"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"absolute-position-encodings","method_name":"Absolute Position Encodings"},{"method_slug":"adam","method_name":"Adam"},{"method_slug":"attention","method_name":"Attention"},{"method_slug":"bpe","method_name":"BPE"},{"method_slug":"dense-connections","method_name":"Dense Connections"},{"method_slug":"dropout","method_name":"Dropout"},{"method_slug":"label-smoothing","method_name":"Label Smoothing"},{"method_slug":"layer-normalization","method_name":"Layer Normalization"},{"method_slug":"linear-layer","method_name":"Linear Layer"},{"method_slug":"multi-head-attention","method_name":"Multi-Head Attention"},{"method_slug":"position-wise-feed-forward-layer","method_name":"Position-Wise Feed-Forward Layer"},{"method_slug":"residual-connection","method_name":"Residual Connection"},{"method_slug":"softmax","method_name":"Softmax"},{"method_slug":"transformer","method_name":"Transformer"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2201.12675","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}