arXiv Machine Learning By Abdessamad El-Kabid, El-Mahdi El-Mhamdi

Approaching the Harm of Gradient Attacks While Only Flipping Labels

Read the original on arXiv Machine Learning →

The paper investigates the impact of label‑flipping attacks on distributed machine learning, where an adversary can only flip a limited number of training labels. It formalizes the attack as a per‑round constrained optimization problem, derives a greedy label‑selection rule for logistic regression, and shows that this rule is provably optimal under mean aggregation. Experiments demonstrate that optimized label flipping can significantly degrade model accuracy, outperforming random flips, and that the attack transfers to other robust aggregators such as coordinate‑wise median and trimmed mean.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv Machine Learning.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 20

Gradient Mirage: Trainable yet Label-Unidentifiable Gradients in Large Language Model Split Learning

Gradient Mirage is a defense for large language model split learning that disrupts the assumption that exposed gradients faithfully reflect the client’s full-label training objective, thereby thwarting gradient matching attacks. It introduces inconsistencies across objective, direction, and scale by using selective autoregressive supervision, scale blinding, and directional privatization with a von Mises-Fisher mechanism. The method preserves utility through dual-track backpropagation and bottom-gradient recovery, achieving a stronger privacy‑utility trade‑off in experiments.

By Shiyu Miao, Yunlong Mao, Zirui Huang, Liang Yao, Tianshuo Zheng, Yanhui Gu, Fan Liu, Sheng Zhong
arXiv AI
2d ago

Cascading Gradient Inversion via LT-Code Inspired Peeling in Federated Learning

The paper introduces a new gradient inversion attack for federated learning that leverages concepts from erasure‑correcting codes to recover entire training batches and their labels from a single FedSGD round. Unlike previous analytic attacks, this method can exactly reconstruct batches of up to 128 samples on ImageNet and achieves over 90% recovery even when the attacker actively manipulates the model. The study demonstrates that federated learning’s privacy leakage is far greater than previously estimated.

By Saeed Shariati, Mohsen Alambardar Meybodi