Search

As a new paradigm in training intelligent models, federated learning is widely used to train a global model without requiring local data to be uploaded from end devices. However, there are often mislabeled samples (i.e., noisy samples) in the dataset, which will cause the model update to deviate from the correct direction during the training process, thus reducing the convergence accuracy of the global model. Existing works employ noisy label correction techniques to reduce the impact of noisy samples on model updates by correcting labels; however, such methods necessitate the use of prior knowledge and additional communication costs, which cannot be directly applied to federated learning due to data privacy concerns and limited communication resources. Therefore, this paper proposes a noise-aware local model training method that corrects the noisy labels directly at the end device under the constraints of federated learning. By constructing a label correction model, a joint optimization problem is formally defined for optimizing both the label correction model and the client-side local training model (e.g., classification model). As a solution to this optimization problem, we propose a robustness training algorithm using label correction, along with a cross-validation data sampling algorithm that updates both models simultaneously. It is verified through experiments that the mechanism can effectively improve the model convergence accuracy on noisy datasets in federated learning scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Federated learning (FL) is a novel distributed learning framework where multiple participants collaboratively train a global model without sharing any raw data to preserve privacy. However, data quality may vary among the participants, the most typical of which is label noise. The incorrect label would significantly damage the performance of the global model. In FL, the inaccessibility of raw data makes this issue more challenging. Previously published studies are limited to using a task-specific benchmark-trained model to evaluate the relevance between the benchmark dataset in the server and the local one on the participants' side. However, such approaches have failed to exploit the cooperative nature of FL itself and are not practical. This paper proposes a Consensus-based Label Correction approach (CLC) in FL, which tries to correct the noisy labels using the developed consensus method among the FL participants. The consensus-defined class-wise information is used to identify the noisy labels and correct them with pseudo-labels. Extensive experiments are conducted on several public datasets in various settings. The experimental results prove the advantage over the state-of-art methods. The link to the source code is https://github.com/bixiao-zeng/CLC.git. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recommender systems typically require the revelation of users' ratings to the recommender server, which will subsequently use these ratings to provide personalized services. However, such revelations make users vulnerable to a broader set of inference attacks, allowing the recommender server to learn users' private attributes, e.g., age and gender. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an efficient federated matrix factorization method that protects users against inference attacks. The key idea is that we obfuscate one user's rating to another such that the private attribute leakage is minimized under the given distortion budget, which bounds the recommending loss and overhead of system efficiency. During the obfuscation, we apply differential privacy to control the information leakage between the users. We also adopt homomorphic encryption to protect the intermediate results during training. Our framework is implemented and tested on real-world datasets. The result shows that our method can reduce up to 16.7% of inference attack accuracy compared to using no privacy protections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]