arXiv Machine Learning By Yijun Quan, Giovanni Montana

Client-Side Probing of Deleted Ridge Statistics in Federated Unlearning

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The paper investigates how federated unlearning systems that broadcast updated linear classifiers after each client update can inadvertently leak the compact, additive summaries used for deletion. By submitting known changes and analyzing the returned classifiers, an attacker can recover the deleted sample’s class or even reinstate it. Experiments on MNIST and CIFAR‑10 show that high‑precision broadcasts enable exact label recovery, while lower precision limits fine‑grained recovery and diverse responses can prevent identification.

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arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 20

FedLNS: Leverage LayerNorm Signature Modeling to Mitigate Adversarial Manipulation in Federated LLMs

FedLNS is a server‑side framework that screens federated learning updates by representing each client’s contribution through changes in trainable normalization‑layer parameters, creating lightweight signatures that can be compared against a history‑aware cross‑client reference. The method requires no extra client‑to‑server communication, raw data, or labeled attack examples, and after screening, the remaining full‑model updates are aggregated with standard federated learning rules. Experiments on GPT‑style, BERT‑style, and LLaMA‑style models with 200 clients demonstrate that FedLNS achieves lower test perplexity than six baselines even when 40% of the population performs target manipulation under both IID and non‑IID data partitions.

By Kai Li, Jong-Ik Park, Carlee Joe-Wong, Wei Ni, Falko Dressler
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 9

SoK: Reconstruction Attacks on Synthetic Tabular Data (Insights from Winning the NIST CRC)

arXiv:2606. 08372v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Synthetic data is increasingly promoted as a privacy-preserving substitute for releasing sensitive tabular records, yet its central adversarial threat ("reconstruction", the recovery of an individual's hidden attribute values from a synthetic release and a handful of known quasi-identifiers) has been studied only in scattered, hard-to-compare settings.

By Steven Golob, Sikha Pentyala, Martine De Cock
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