# Sparsified Secure Aggregation for Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.12872 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12872/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Dec 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.05629/) (2016)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [Fashion-MNIST: a Novel Image Dataset for Benchmarking Machine Learning Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07747/) (2017)
- [Advances and Open Problems in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04977/) (2019)
- [Deep Learning with Differential Privacy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.00133/) (2016)
- [On the Convergence of FedAvg on Non-IID Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02189/) (2019)
- [Deep Leakage from Gradients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08935/) (2019)
- [Towards Federated Learning at Scale: System Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.01046/) (2019)
- [Inverting Gradients -- How easy is it to break privacy in federated learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.14053/) (2020)
- [The Future of Digital Health with Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08119/) (2020)
- [Local SGD Converges Fast and Communicates Little](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.09767/) (2018)
- [Deep Gradient Compression: Reducing the Communication Bandwidth for Distributed Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.01887/) (2017)
- [Robust and Communication-Efficient Federated Learning from Non-IID Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.02891/) (2019)
- [Federated Machine Learning: Concept and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.04885/) (2019)
- [Sparsified SGD with Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.07599/) (2018)
- [Sparse Communication for Distributed Gradient Descent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05021/) (2017)
- [Gradient Sparsification for Communication-Efficient Distributed Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09854/) (2017)
- [Client Selection in Federated Learning: Convergence Analysis and Power-of-Choice Selection Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01243/) (2020)
- [FedHealth: A Federated Transfer Learning Framework for Wearable Healthcare](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.09173/) (2019)
- [Optimal Client Sampling for Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.13723/) (2020)
- [Byzantine-Resilient Secure Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11115/) (2020)
- [Turbo-Aggregate: Breaking the Quadratic Aggregation Barrier in Secure Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.04156/) (2020)
- [Ternary Compression for Communication-Efficient Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.03564/) (2020)
- [Communication-Efficient Federated Learning via Optimal Client Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15197/) (2020)
- [Optimal Gradient Compression for Distributed and Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03246/) (2020)
- [Securing Secure Aggregation: Mitigating Multi-Round Privacy Leakage in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03328/) (2021)
- [Bandit-based Communication-Efficient Client Selection Strategies for Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.08009/) (2020)
- [FEDZIP: A Compression Framework for Communication-Efficient Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.01593/) (2021)
- [CodedPrivateML: A Fast and Privacy-Preserving Framework for Distributed Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00641/) (2019)
- [Adaptive Federated Learning With Gradient Compression in Uplink NOMA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01344/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Machine Unlearning of Federated Clusters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.16424/) (2022)
- [How Much Privacy Does Federated Learning with Secure Aggregation Guarantee?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.02304/) (2022)
- [Federated Progressive Sparsification (Purge, Merge, Tune)+](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12430/) (2022)
- [OLIVE: Oblivious Federated Learning on Trusted Execution Environment against the risk of sparsification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07165/) (2022)
- [FedREP: A Byzantine-Robust, Communication-Efficient and Privacy-Preserving Framework for Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05206/) (2023)
- [Communication-Efficient Secure Aggregation in Decentralized Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07708/) (2024)
- [Fractional-Order Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.15380/) (2026)
- [The Capacity of Information-Theoretic Secure Aggregation in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.07277/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Secure aggregation is a popular protocol in privacy-preserving federated learning, which allows model aggregation without revealing the individual models in the clear. On the other hand, conventional secure aggregation protocols incur a significant communication overhead, which can become a major bottleneck in real-world bandwidth-limited applications. Towards addressing this challenge, in this work we propose a lightweight gradient sparsification framework for secure aggregation, in which the server learns the aggregate of the sparsified local model updates from a large number of users, but without learning the individual parameters. Our theoretical analysis demonstrates that the proposed framework can significantly reduce the communication overhead of secure aggregation while ensuring comparable computational complexity. We further identify a trade-off between privacy and communication efficiency due to sparsification. Our experiments demonstrate that our framework reduces the communication overhead by up to 7.8x, while also speeding up the wall clock training time by 1.13x, when compared to conventional secure aggregation benchmarks.