arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 15

Privacy-Aligned Personalized Federated Learning with Compact Adaptation and Variable-Length Gaussian Communication

The paper proposes a privacy‑aligned personalized federated learning method that releases a private client context once and limits repeated adaptation to a fixed coefficient space, thereby reducing dimensionality misalignment. A factorized generator creates an adaptive optimization geometry that reshapes noisy updates, and most of the private‑training benefit is preserved by radial evolution. Variable‑length Gaussian quantization is used for coefficient updates, allowing the quantization error to act as the privacy perturbation and cutting protected uplink communication by a factor of 2.67 on CIFAR‑10 at ε=16 while maintaining comparable future‑client accuracy.

By Yilin Xu, Chun Hei Michael Shiu, Chih Wei Ling, Linqi Song
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

Theoretically Principled Federated Learning for Balancing Privacy and Utility

The paper introduces a general learning framework that protects privacy in federated learning by distorting model parameters, enabling a trade‑off between privacy and utility. The algorithm supports arbitrary privacy measurements and delivers personalized utility‑privacy balances for each parameter, client, and communication round. The authors prove that the gap between their algorithm’s utility loss and the optimal loss is sub‑linear in iterations, provide a convergence rate, and demonstrate empirically that their method outperforms baselines under the same privacy budget.

By Xiaojin Zhang, Wenjie Li, Yiming Li, Wei Chen, Shutao Xia, Qiang Yang