Privacy and communication constraints are two major bottlenecks in federated learning (FL) and analytics (FA). We study the optimal accuracy of mean and frequency estimation (canonical models for FL and FA respectively) under joint communication and $(\varepsilon, \delta)$-differential privacy (DP) constraints. We show that in order to achieve the optimal error under $(\varepsilon, \delta)$-DP, it is sufficient for each client to send $\Theta\left( n \min\left(\varepsilon, \varepsilon^2\right)\right)$ bits for FL and $\Theta\left(\log\left( n\min\left(\varepsilon, \varepsilon^2\right) \right)\right)$ bits for FA to the server, where $n$ is the number of participating clients. Without compression, each client needs $O(d)$ bits and $\log d$ bits for the mean and frequency estimation problems respectively (where $d$ corresponds to the number of trainable parameters in FL or the domain size in FA), which means that we can get significant savings in the regime $ n \min\left(\varepsilon, \varepsilon^2\right) = o(d)$, which is often the relevant regime in practice. Our algorithms leverage compression for privacy amplification: when each client communicates only partial information about its sample, we show that privacy can be amplified by randomly selecting the part contributed by each client.
The approximate degree of a Boolean function is the minimum degree of real polynomial that approximates it pointwise. For any Boolean function, its approximate degree serves as a lower bound on its quantum query complexity, and generically lifts to a quantum communication lower bound for a related function. We introduce a framework for proving approximate degree lower bounds for certain oracle identification problems, where the goal is to recover a hidden binary string $x \in \{0, 1\}^n$ given possibly non-standard oracle access to it. Our lower bounds apply to decision versions of these problems, where the goal is to compute the parity of $x$. We apply our framework to the ordered search and hidden string problems, proving nearly tight approximate degree lower bounds of $\Omega(n/\log^2 n)$ for each. These lower bounds generalize to the weakly unbounded error setting, giving a new quantum query lower bound for the hidden string problem in this regime. Our lower bounds are driven by randomized communication upper bounds for the greater-than and equality functions.
In image compression, with recent advances in generative modeling, the existence of a trade-off between the rate and the perceptual quality has been brought to light, where the perception is measured by the closeness of the output distribution to the source. This leads to the question: how does a perception constraint impact the trade-off between the rate and traditional distortion constraints, typically quantified by a single-letter distortion measure? We consider the compression of a memoryless source $X$ in the presence of memoryless side information $Z,$ studied by Wyner and Ziv, but elucidate the impact of a perfect realism constraint, which requires the output distribution to match the source distribution. We consider two cases: when $Z$ is available only at the decoder or at both the encoder and the decoder. The rate-distortion trade-off with perfect realism is characterized for sources on general alphabets when infinite common randomness is available between the encoder and the decoder. We show that, similarly to traditional source coding with side information, the two cases are equivalent when $X$ and $Z$ are jointly Gaussian under the squared error distortion measure. We also provide a general inner bound in the case of limited common randomness.
Federated learning (FL) allows a large number of clients to collaboratively train machine learning (ML) models by sending only their local gradients to a central server for aggregation in each training iteration, without sending their raw training data. Unfortunately, recent attacks on FL demonstrate that local gradients may leak information about local training data. In response to such attacks, Bonawitz \textit{et al.} (CCS 2017) proposed a secure aggregation protocol that allows a server to compute the sum of clients' local gradients in a secure manner. However, their secure aggregation protocol requires at least 4 rounds of communication between each client and the server in each training iteration. The number of communication rounds is closely related not only to the total communication cost but also the ML model accuracy, as the number of communication rounds affects client dropouts. In this paper, we propose FSSA, a 3-round secure aggregation protocol, that is efficient in terms of computation and communication, and resilient to client dropouts. We prove the security of FSSA in honest-but-curious setting and show that the security can be maintained even if an arbitrarily chosen subset of clients drop out at any time. We evaluate the performance of FSSA and show that its computation and communication overhead remains low even on large datasets. Furthermore, we conduct an experimental comparison between FSSA and Bonawitz \textit{et al.}'s protocol. The comparison results show that, in addition to reducing the number of communication rounds, FSSA achieves a significant improvement in computational efficiency.
Federated learning (FL) shines through in the internet of things (IoT) with its ability to realize collaborative learning and improve learning efficiency by sharing client model parameters trained on local data. Although FL has been successfully applied to various domains, including driver monitoring applications (DMAs) on the internet of vehicles (IoV), its usages still face some open issues, such as data and system heterogeneity, large-scale parallelism communication resources, malicious attacks, and data poisoning. This paper proposes a federated transfer-ordered-personalized learning (FedTOP) framework to address the above problems and test on two real-world datasets with and without system heterogeneity. The performance of the three extensions, transfer, ordered, and personalized, is compared by an ablation study and achieves 92.32% and 95.96% accuracy on the test clients of two datasets, respectively. Compared to the baseline, there is a 462% improvement in accuracy and a 37.46% reduction in communication resource consumption. The results demonstrate that the proposed FedTOP can be used as a highly accurate, streamlined, privacy-preserving, cybersecurity-oriented, and personalized framework for DMA.
Enabling quantum switches (QSs) to serve requests submitted by quantum end nodes in quantum communication networks (QCNs) is a challenging problem due to the heterogeneous fidelity requirements of the submitted requests and the limited resources of the QCN. Effectively determining which requests are served by a given QS is fundamental to foster developments in practical QCN applications, like quantum data centers. However, the state-of-the-art on QS operation has overlooked this association problem, and it mainly focused on QCNs with a single QS. In this paper, the request-QS association problem in QCNs is formulated as a matching game that captures the limited QCN resources, heterogeneous application-specific fidelity requirements, and scheduling of the different QS operations. To solve this game, a swap-stable request-QS association (RQSA) algorithm is proposed while considering partial QCN information availability. Extensive simulations are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed RQSA algorithm. Simulation results show that the proposed RQSA algorithm achieves a near-optimal (within 5%) performance in terms of the percentage of served requests and overall achieved fidelity, while outperforming benchmark greedy solutions by over 13%. Moreover, the proposed RQSA algorithm is shown to be scalable and maintain its near-optimal performance even when the size of the QCN increases.
Vertical federate learning (VFL) has recently emerged as an appealing distributed paradigm empowering multi-party collaboration for training high-quality models over vertically partitioned datasets. Gradient boosting has been popularly adopted in VFL, which builds an ensemble of weak learners (typically decision trees) to achieve promising prediction performance. Recently there have been growing interests in using decision table as an intriguing alternative weak learner in gradient boosting, due to its simpler structure, good interpretability, and promising performance. In the literature, there have been works on privacy-preserving VFL for gradient boosted decision trees, but no prior work has been devoted to the emerging case of decision tables. Training and inference on decision tables are different from that the case of generic decision trees, not to mention gradient boosting with decision tables in VFL. In light of this, we design, implement, and evaluate Privet, the first system framework enabling privacy-preserving VFL service for gradient boosted decision tables. Privet delicately builds on lightweight cryptography and allows an arbitrary number of participants holding vertically partitioned datasets to securely train gradient boosted decision tables. Extensive experiments over several real-world datasets and synthetic datasets demonstrate that Privet achieves promising performance, with utility comparable to plaintext centralized learning.
Federated Learning (FL) with quantization and deliberately added noise over wireless networks is a promising approach to preserve user differential privacy (DP) while reducing wireless resources. Specifically, an FL process can be fused with quantized Binomial mechanism-based updates contributed by multiple users. However, optimizing quantization parameters, communication resources (e.g., transmit power, bandwidth, and quantization bits), and the added noise to guarantee the DP requirement and performance of the learned FL model remains an open and challenging problem. This article aims to jointly optimize the quantization and Binomial mechanism parameters and communication resources to maximize the convergence rate under the constraints of the wireless network and DP requirement. To that end, we first derive a novel DP budget estimation of the FL with quantization/noise that is tighter than the state-of-the-art bound. We then provide a theoretical bound on the convergence rate. This theoretical bound is decomposed into two components, including the variance of the global gradient and the quadratic bias that can be minimized by optimizing the communication resources, and quantization/noise parameters. The resulting optimization turns out to be a Mixed-Integer Non-linear Programming (MINLP) problem. To tackle it, we first transform this MINLP problem into a new problem whose solutions are proved to be the optimal solutions of the original one. We then propose an approximate algorithm to solve the transformed problem with an arbitrary relative error guarantee. Extensive simulations show that under the same wireless resource constraints and DP protection requirements, the proposed approximate algorithm achieves an accuracy close to the accuracy of the conventional FL without quantization/noise. The results can achieve a higher convergence rate while preserving users' privacy.
In experimental and observational studies, there is often interest in understanding the mechanism through which an intervention program improves the final outcome. Causal mediation analyses have been developed for this purpose but are primarily considered for the case of perfect treatment compliance, with a few exceptions that require the exclusion restriction assumption. In this article, we consider a semiparametric framework for assessing causal mediation in the presence of treatment noncompliance without the exclusion restriction. We propose a set of assumptions to identify the natural mediation effects for the entire study population and further, for the principal natural mediation effects within subpopulations characterized by the potential compliance behavior. We derive the efficient influence functions for the principal natural mediation effect estimands and motivate a set of multiply robust estimators for inference. The multiply robust estimators remain consistent to their respective estimands under four types of misspecification of the working models and are efficient when all nuisance models are correctly specified. We further introduce a nonparametric extension of the proposed estimators by incorporating machine learners to estimate the nuisance functions. Sensitivity analysis methods are also discussed for addressing key identification assumptions. We demonstrate the proposed methods via simulations and an application to a real data example.
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is the problem of estimating the value of a target policy using historical data collected under a different logging policy. OPE methods typically assume overlap between the target and logging policy, enabling solutions based on importance weighting and/or imputation. In this work, we approach OPE without assuming either overlap or a well-specified model by considering a strategy based on partial identification under non-parametric assumptions on the conditional mean function, focusing especially on Lipschitz smoothness. Under such smoothness assumptions, we formulate a pair of linear programs whose optimal values upper and lower bound the contributions of the no-overlap region to the off-policy value. We show that these linear programs have a concise closed form solution that can be computed efficiently and that their solutions converge, under the Lipschitz assumption, to the sharp partial identification bounds on the off-policy value. Furthermore, we show that the rate of convergence is minimax optimal, up to log factors. We deploy our methods on two semi-synthetic examples, and obtain informative and valid bounds that are tighter than those possible without smoothness assumptions.
Federated learning (FL) enables participating parties to collaboratively build a global model with boosted utility without disclosing private data information. Appropriate protection mechanisms have to be adopted to fulfill the requirements in preserving \textit{privacy} and maintaining high model \textit{utility}. The nature of the widely-adopted protection mechanisms including \textit{Randomization Mechanism} and \textit{Compression Mechanism} is to protect privacy via distorting model parameter. We measure the utility via the gap between the original model parameter and the distorted model parameter. We want to identify under what general conditions privacy-preserving federated learning can achieve near-optimal utility via data generation and parameter distortion. To provide an avenue for achieving near-optimal utility, we present an upper bound for utility loss, which is measured using two main terms called variance-reduction and model parameter discrepancy separately. Our analysis inspires the design of appropriate protection parameters for the protection mechanisms to achieve near-optimal utility and meet the privacy requirements simultaneously. The main techniques for the protection mechanism include parameter distortion and data generation, which are generic and can be applied extensively. Furthermore, we provide an upper bound for the trade-off between privacy and utility, which together with the lower bound illustrated in NFL form the conditions for achieving optimal trade-off.