# Approximate and Weighted Data Reconstruction Attack in Federated Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.06822 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06822/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Aug 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.05629/) (2016)
- [Federated Learning: Challenges, Methods, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07873/) (2019)
- [Deep Leakage from Gradients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08935/) (2019)
- [A Tutorial on Bayesian Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.02811/) (2018)
- [Inverting Gradients -- How easy is it to break privacy in federated learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.14053/) (2020)
- [iDLG: Improved Deep Leakage from Gradients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.02610/) (2020)
- [See through Gradients: Image Batch Recovery via GradInversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07586/) (2021)
- [Gradient Inversion with Generative Image Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14962/) (2021)
- [SAPAG: A Self-Adaptive Privacy Attack From Gradients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.06228/) (2020)
- [Federated Learning on the Road: Autonomous Controller Design for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03401/) (2021)
- [AGIC: Approximate Gradient Inversion Attack on Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13784/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [FedADMM-InSa: An Inexact and Self-Adaptive ADMM for Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13989/) (2024)
- [One-Shot Clustering for Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04231/) (2025)
- [One-Shot Clustering for Federated Learning Under Clustering-Agnostic Assumption](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.01587/) (2025)
- [Machine Learning and Control: Foundations, Advances, and Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.03303/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Federated Learning (FL) is a distributed learning paradigm that enables multiple clients to collaborate on building a machine learning model without sharing their private data. Although FL is considered privacy-preserved by design, recent data reconstruction attacks demonstrate that an attacker can recover clients' training data based on the parameters shared in FL. However, most existing methods fail to attack the most widely used horizontal Federated Averaging (FedAvg) scenario, where clients share model parameters after multiple local training steps. To tackle this issue, we propose an interpolation-based approximation method, which makes attacking FedAvg scenarios feasible by generating the intermediate model updates of the clients' local training processes. Then, we design a layer-wise weighted loss function to improve the data quality of reconstruction. We assign different weights to model updates in different layers concerning the neural network structure, with the weights tuned by Bayesian optimization. Finally, experimental results validate the superiority of our proposed approximate and weighted attack (AWA) method over the other state-of-the-art methods, as demonstrated by the substantial improvement in different evaluation metrics for image data reconstructions.