SignDS-FL: Local Differentially Private Federated Learning with Sign-based Dimension Selection

Federated Learning (FL) [31] is a decentralized learning mechanism that has attracted increasing attention due to its achievements in computational efficiency and privacy preservation. However, recent research highlights that the original FL framework may still reveal sensitive information of clients’ local data from the exchanged local updates and the global model parameters. Local Differential Privacy (LDP), as a rigorous definition of privacy, has been applied to Federated Learning to provide formal privacy guarantees and prevent potential privacy leakage. However, previous LDP-FL solutions suffer from considerable utility loss with an increase of model dimensionality. Recent work [29] proposed a two-stage framework that mitigates the dimension-dependency problem by first selecting one “important” dimension for each local update and then perturbing the dimension value to construct the sparse privatized update. However, the framework may still suffer from utility loss because of the insufficient per-stage privacy budget and slow model convergence. In this article, we propose an improved framework, SignDS-FL, which shares the concept of dimension selection with Reference [29], but saves the privacy cost for the value perturbation stage by assigning random sign values to the selected dimensions. Besides using the single-dimension selection algorithms in Reference [29], we propose an Exponential Mechanism-based Multi-Dimension Selection algorithm that further improves model convergence and accuracy. We evaluate the framework on a number of real-world datasets with both simple logistic regression models and deep neural networks. For training logistic regression models on structured datasets, our framework yields only a \( \sim \) 1%–2% accuracy loss in comparison to a \( \sim \) 5%–15% decrease of accuracy for the baseline methods. For training deep neural networks on image datasets, the accuracy loss of our framework is less than \( 8\% \) and at best only \( 2\% \) . Extensive experimental results show that our framework significantly outperforms the previous LDP-FL solutions and enjoys an advanced utility-privacy balance.