On Privacy and Personalization in Cross-Silo Federated Learning

Authors: Ken Liu, Shengyuan Hu, Steven Z. Wu, Virginia Smith

NeurIPS 2022 | Conference PDF | Archive PDF | Plain Text | LLM Run Details

Reproducibility Variable Result LLM Response
Research Type Experimental We provide an empirical study of competing methods as well as a theoretical characterization of MR-MTL for mean estimation, highlighting the interplay between privacy and cross-silo data heterogeneity. Our work serves to establish baselines for private cross-silo FL as well as identify key directions of future work in this area. and Fig. 3 shows the privacy-utility tradeoffs across four datasets. We observe that MR-MTL consistently outperforms a suite of baseline methods, and that it performs at least as good as local training and Fed Avg (endpoints of the personalization spectrum), except at high-privacy regimes (possibly different for each dataset).
Researcher Affiliation Academia Carnegie Mellon University {kzliu, shengyuanhu, zstevenwu, smithv}@cmu.edu
Pseudocode Yes Of particular interest is the family of mean-regularized multi-task learning (MR-MTL) methods [30, 94, 38, 37] (see Algorithm A1 for a typical instantiation).
Open Source Code Yes Code is available at https://github.com/kenziyuliu/private-cross-silo-fl.
Open Datasets Yes We consider four cross-silo datasets that span regression/classification and convex/nonconvex tasks: Vehicle [26], School [35], Google Glass (GLEAM) [82], and CIFAR-10 [53]. See Appendix C.1 for more details and datasets.
Dataset Splits Yes CIFAR-10 has heterogeneous client splits following [94, 90]. See Appendix C.1 for more details and datasets. For Vehicle, School, and GLEAM, we adopt the existing dataset splits as described in [57, 59] and [16] respectively, and for CIFAR-10, we generated heterogeneous client splits as described in [94, 90].
Hardware Specification No No. The paper states 'All experiments are implemented in JAX [14] with Haiku [42] and run on GPU machines. The total computational budget for the main experiments is about 500 GPU hours.', but it does not specify the type or model of the GPUs used.
Software Dependencies No No. The paper mentions software such as 'JAX [14] with Haiku [42]' but does not provide specific version numbers for these or other software dependencies.
Experiment Setup Yes For all methods, we use minibatch DP-SGD in each silo to satisfy silo-specific sample-level privacy; while certain methods may have more efficient solvers (e.g. dual form for [91]), we want compatibility with DP-SGD as well as privacy amplification via sampling on the example level for tight accounting. For all experiments, silos train for 1 local epoch in every round (except for [57] which runs 2 epochs). Hyperparameter tuning is done via grid search for all methods. Learning rate is fixed to 0.005 for all datasets and models, with cosine annealing to 0.