# FedHide: Federated Learning by Hiding in the Neighbors

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.07808 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07808/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Sep 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [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)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.4546/) (2013)
- [Federated Optimization in Heterogeneous Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.06127/) (2018)
- [FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03832/) (2015)
- [Group Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08494/) (2018)
- [Federated Learning: Strategies for Improving Communication Efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.05492/) (2016)
- [On the Convergence of FedAvg on Non-IID Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02189/) (2019)
- [VGGFace2: A dataset for recognising faces across pose and age](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.08092/) (2017)
- [VoxCeleb2: Deep Speaker Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.05622/) (2018)
- [Towards Federated Learning at Scale: System Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.01046/) (2019)
- [Model-Contrastive Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16257/) (2021)
- [VoxCeleb: a large-scale speaker identification dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.08612/) (2017)
- [Inverting Gradients -- How easy is it to break privacy in federated learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.14053/) (2020)
- [Robust and Communication-Efficient Federated Learning from Non-IID Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.02891/) (2019)
- [FedProto: Federated Prototype Learning across Heterogeneous Clients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.00243/) (2021)
- [The Non-IID Data Quagmire of Decentralized Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.00189/) (2019)
- [Additive Margin Softmax for Face Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.05599/) (2018)
- [Evaluating Gradient Inversion Attacks and Defenses in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00059/) (2021)
- [MobileFaceNets: Efficient CNNs for Accurate Real-Time Face Verification on Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07573/) (2018)
- [Federated Learning from Pre-Trained Models: A Contrastive Learning Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.10083/) (2022)
- [In defence of metric learning for speaker recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.11982/) (2020)
- [DROCC: Deep Robust One-Class Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.12718/) (2020)
- [Tackling Data Heterogeneity in Federated Learning with Class Prototypes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02758/) (2022)
- [Collaborative Learning for Faster StyleGAN Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01758/) (2020)
- [Federated Learning with Only Positive Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10342/) (2020)
- [Gradient Disaggregation: Breaking Privacy in Federated Learning by Reconstructing the User Participant Matrix](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06089/) (2021)
- [Adversarial Learning with Margin-based Triplet Embedding Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.09481/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose a prototype-based federated learning method designed for embedding networks in classification or verification tasks. Our focus is on scenarios where each client has data from a single class. The main challenge is to develop an embedding network that can distinguish between different classes while adhering to privacy constraints. Sharing true class prototypes with the server or other clients could potentially compromise sensitive information. To tackle this issue, we propose a proxy class prototype that will be shared among clients instead of the true class prototype. Our approach generates proxy class prototypes by linearly combining them with their nearest neighbors. This technique conceals the true class prototype while enabling clients to learn discriminative embedding networks. We compare our method to alternative techniques, such as adding random Gaussian noise and using random selection with cosine similarity constraints. Furthermore, we evaluate the robustness of our approach against gradient inversion attacks and introduce a measure for prototype leakage. This measure quantifies the extent of private information revealed when sharing the proposed proxy class prototype. Moreover, we provide a theoretical analysis of the convergence properties of our approach. Our proposed method for federated learning from scratch demonstrates its effectiveness through empirical results on three benchmark datasets: CIFAR-100, VoxCeleb1, and VGGFace2.