Convergent Differential Privacy Analysis for General Federated Learning

Yan Sun, Qixin Zhang, Li Shen, Dacheng Tao

Keywords: Federated learning, differential privacy

TL;DR: We provide a convergent differential privacy analysis for federated learning.

Abstract: The powerful cooperation of federated learning (FL) and differential privacy (DP) provides a promising paradigm for the large-scale private clients. However, existing analyses in FL-DP mostly rely on the composition theorem and cannot tightly quantify the privacy leakage challenges, which is tight for a few communication rounds but yields an arbitrarily loose and divergent bound eventually. This also implies a counterintuitive judgment, suggesting that FL-DP may not provide adequate privacy support during long-term training under constant-level noisy perturbations, yielding discrepancy between the theoretical and experimental results. To further investigate the convergent privacy and reliability of the FL-DP framework, in this paper, we comprehensively evaluate the worst privacy of two classical methods under the non-convex and smooth objectives based on the $f$-DP analysis. With the aid of the shifted interpolation technique, we successfully prove that privacy in {\ttfamily Noisy-FedAvg} has a tight convergent bound. Moreover, with the regularization of the proxy term, privacy in {\ttfamily Noisy-FedProx} has a stable constant lower bound. Our analysis further demonstrates a solid theoretical foundation for the reliability of privacy in FL-DP. Meanwhile, our conclusions can also be losslessly converted to other classical DP analytical frameworks, e.g. $(\epsilon,\delta)$-DP and R$\acute{\text{e}}$nyi-DP~(RDP), to provide more fine-grained understandings for the FL-DP frameworks.

Primary Area: Social and economic aspects of machine learning (e.g., fairness, interpretability, human-AI interaction, privacy, safety, strategic behavior)

Submission Number: 8207