Papers › An Accuracy-Lossless Perturbation Method for Defending Privacy Attacks in Federated Learning

An Accuracy-Lossless Perturbation Method for Defending Privacy Attacks in Federated Learning

23 Feb 2020arXiv:2002.09843archive 2025-07-28

Xue Yang, Yan Feng, Weijun Fang, Jun Shao, Xiaohu Tang, Shu-Tao Xia, Rongxing Lu

Although federated learning improves privacy of training data by exchanging local gradients or parameters rather than raw data, the adversary still can leverage local gradients and parameters to obtain local training data by launching reconstruction and membership inference attacks. To defend such privacy attacks, many noises perturbation methods (like differential privacy or CountSketch matrix) have been widely designed. However, the strong defence ability and high learning accuracy of these schemes cannot be ensured at the same time, which will impede the wide application of FL in practice (especially for medical or financial institutions that require both high accuracy and strong privacy guarantee). To overcome this issue, in this paper, we propose \emph{an efficient model perturbation method for federated learning} to defend reconstruction and membership inference attacks launched by curious clients. On the one hand, similar to the differential privacy, our method also selects random numbers as perturbed noises added to the global model parameters, and thus it is very efficient and easy to be integrated in practice. Meanwhile, the random selected noises are positive real numbers and the corresponding value can be arbitrarily large, and thus the strong defence ability can be ensured. On the other hand, unlike differential privacy or other perturbation methods that cannot eliminate the added noises, our method allows the server to recover the true gradients by eliminating the added noises. Therefore, our method does not hinder learning accuracy at all.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

Kira0096/PBPFL officialpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Federated Learning

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

1x1 ConvolutionAverage PoolingBatch NormalizationBottleneck Residual BlockConcatenated Skip ConnectionConvolutionDense BlockDense ConnectionsDropoutGlobal Average PoolingKaiming InitializationMax PoolingReLUResidual BlockResidual ConnectionSoftmax

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections