Secure Federated Learning of User Verification Models

Hossein Hosseini, Hyunsin Park, Sungrack Yun, Christos Louizos, Joseph Soriaga, Max Welling

Keywords: Federated learning, User verification models

Abstract: We consider the problem of training User Verification (UV) models in federated setup, where the conventional loss functions are not applicable due to the constraints that each user has access to the data of only one class and user embeddings cannot be shared with the server or other users. To address this problem, we propose Federated User Verification (FedUV), a framework for private and secure training of UV models. In FedUV, users jointly learn a set of vectors and maximize the correlation of their instance embeddings with a secret user-defined linear combination of those vectors. We show that choosing the linear combinations from the codewords of an error-correcting code allows users to collaboratively train the model without revealing their embedding vectors. We present the experimental results for user verification with voice, face, and handwriting data and show that FedUV is on par with existing approaches, while not sharing the embeddings with other users or the server.

One-sentence Summary: We propose a private and secure method for training user verification models in federated setup.

Code Of Ethics: I acknowledge that I and all co-authors of this work have read and commit to adhering to the ICLR Code of Ethics

Reviewed Version (pdf): https://openreview.net/references/pdf?id=9zvTluCxaS