FedCG: Leverage Conditional GAN for Protecting Privacy and Maintaining Competitive Performance in Federated Learning

Federated learning (FL) aims to protect data privacy by enabling clients to build machine learning models collaboratively without sharing their private data. Recent works demonstrate that information exchanged during FL is subject to gradient-based privacy attacks and, consequently, a variety of privacy-preserving methods have been adopted to thwart such attacks. However, these defensive methods either introduce orders of magnitudes more computational and communication overheads (e.g., with homomorphic encryption) or incur substantial model performance losses in terms of prediction accuracy (e.g., with differential privacy). In this work, we propose FEDCG, a novel federated learning method that leverages conditional generative adversarial networks to achieve high-level privacy protection while still maintaining competitive model performance. FEDCG decomposes each client's local network into a private extractor and a public classifier and keeps the extractor local to protect privacy. Instead of exposing extractors, FEDCG shares clients' generators with the server for aggregating clients' shared knowledge aiming to enhance the performance of each client's local networks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FEDCG can achieve competitive model performance compared with FL baselines, and privacy analysis shows that FEDCG has a high-level privacy-preserving capability.