# RAIFLE: Reconstruction Attacks on Interaction-based Federated Learning with Adversarial Data Manipulation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.19163 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19163/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 47 of its 84 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.05629/) (2016)
- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Convex optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01946/) (2021)
- [Membership Inference Attacks against Machine Learning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.05820/) (2016)
- [Jailbroken: How Does LLM Safety Training Fail?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02483/) (2023)
- [Designing Network Design Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13678/) (2020)
- [MnasNet: Platform-Aware Neural Architecture Search for Mobile](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11626/) (2018)
- [A Closer Look at Memorization in Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05394/) (2017)
- [Automatic differentiation in machine learning: a survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.05767/) (2015)
- [How To Backdoor Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.00459/) (2018)
- [Inverting Gradients -- How easy is it to break privacy in federated learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.14053/) (2020)
- [Evolution Strategies as a Scalable Alternative to Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03864/) (2017)
- [Federated Learning with Differential Privacy: Algorithms and Performance Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00222/) (2019)
- [Towards Personalized Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00710/) (2021)
- [Threat of Adversarial Attacks on Deep Learning in Computer Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.00553/) (2018)
- [Backdoor Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08745/) (2020)
- [Adversarial Examples: Attacks and Defenses for Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.07107/) (2017)
- [Improving the Gaussian Mechanism for Differential Privacy: Analytical Calibration and Optimal Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.06530/) (2018)
- [Evaluating Gradient Inversion Attacks and Defenses in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00059/) (2021)
- [Protection Against Reconstruction and Its Applications in Private Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00984/) (2018)
- [The Distributed Discrete Gaussian Mechanism for Federated Learning with Secure Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06387/) (2021)
- [Advances in adversarial attacks and defenses in computer vision: A survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.00401/) (2021)
- [Introducing LETOR 4.0 Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.2597/) (2013)
- [Robbing the Fed: Directly Obtaining Private Data in Federated Learning with Modified Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13057/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning for IoT: A Cross-Paradigm Survey and Future Roadmap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.13570/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Federated learning has emerged as a promising privacy-preserving solution for machine learning domains that rely on user interactions, particularly recommender systems and online learning to rank. While there has been substantial research on the privacy of traditional federated learning, little attention has been paid to the privacy properties of these interaction-based settings. In this work, we show that users face an elevated risk of having their private interactions reconstructed by the central server when the server can control the training features of the items that users interact with. We introduce RAIFLE, a novel optimization-based attack framework where the server actively manipulates the features of the items presented to users to increase the success rate of reconstruction. Our experiments with federated recommendation and online learning-to-rank scenarios demonstrate that RAIFLE is significantly more powerful than existing reconstruction attacks like gradient inversion, achieving high performance consistently in most settings. We discuss the pros and cons of several possible countermeasures to defend against RAIFLE in the context of interaction-based federated learning. Our code is open-sourced at https://github.com/dzungvpham/raifle.