NeurIPS 2023 Competition: Privacy Preserving Federated Learning Document VQA

Marlon Tobaben, Mohamed Ali Souibgui, Rubèn Tito, Khanh Nguyen, Raouf Kerkouche, Kangsoo Jung, Joonas Jälkö, Lei Kang, Andrey Barsky, Vincent Poulain d'Andecy, Aurélie JOSEPH, Aashiq Muhamed, Kevin Kuo, Virginia Smith, Yusuke Yamasaki, Takumi Fukami, Kenta Niwa, Iifan Tyou, Hiro Ishii, Rio Yokota et al. (7 additional authors not shown)

Keywords: Differential privacy, Federated Learning, Document Understanding, Document Visual Question Answering

TL;DR: We present an analysis of the NeurIPS 2023 competition on privacy preserving FL DocVQA that we designed and suggest best practices for future competitions.

Abstract: The Privacy Preserving Federated Learning Document VQA (PFL-DocVQA) competition challenged the community to develop provably private and communication-efficient solutions in a federated setting for a real-life use case: invoice processing. The competition introduced a dataset of real invoice documents, along with associated questions and answers requiring information extraction and reasoning over the document images. Thereby, it brings together researchers and expertise from the document analysis, privacy, and federated learning communities. Participants fine-tuned a pre-trained, state-of-the-art Document Visual Question Answering model provided by the organizers for this new domain, mimicking a typical federated invoice processing setup. The base model is a multi-modal generative language model, and sensitive information could be exposed through either the visual or textual input modality. Participants proposed elegant solutions to reduce communication costs while maintaining a minimum utility threshold in track 1 and to protect all information from each document provider using differential privacy in track 2. The competition served as a new testbed for developing and testing private federated learning methods, simultaneously raising awareness about privacy within the document image analysis and recognition community. Ultimately, the competition analysis provides best practices and recommendations for successfully running privacy-focused federated learning challenges in the future.

NeurIPS 23 Competition Analysis Paper: NeurIPS23 Competition Analysis Paper

NeurIPS 23 Competition Name For Competition Analysis Papers Only: Privacy Preserving Federated Learning Document VQA

Submission Number: 1137