SPEAR: Exact Gradient Inversion of Batches in Federated Learning


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Date

2024

Publication Type

Conference Paper

ETH Bibliography

yes

Citations

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Data

Abstract

Federated learning is a framework for collaborative machine learning where clients only share gradient updates and not their private data with a server. However, it was recently shown that gradient inversion attacks can reconstruct this data from the shared gradients. In the important honest-but-curious setting, existing attacks enable exact reconstruction only for batch size of $b=1$, with larger batches permitting only approximate reconstruction. In this work, we propose SPEAR, the first algorithm reconstructing whole batches with $b >1$ exactly. SPEAR combines insights into the explicit low-rank structure of gradients with a sampling-based algorithm. Crucially, we leverage ReLU-induced gradient sparsity to precisely filter out large numbers of incorrect samples, making a final reconstruction step tractable. We provide an efficient GPU implementation for fully connected networks and show that it recovers high-dimensional ImageNet inputs in batches of up to $b \lesssim 25$ exactly while scaling to large networks. Finally, we show theoretically that much larger batches can be reconstructed with high probability given exponential time.

Publication status

published

Book title

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37

Journal / series

Volume

Pages / Article No.

106768 - 106799

Publisher

Curran

Event

38th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2024)

Edition / version

Methods

Software

Geographic location

Date collected

Date created

Subject

Organisational unit

03948 - Vechev, Martin / Vechev, Martin check_circle

Notes

Poster presentation on December 10, 2024.

Funding

101070617/22.00164 - European Lighthouse on Secure and Safe AI (SBFI)

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