An End-to-End Encrypted Neural Network for Gradient Updates Transmission in Federated Learning

Abstract: Federated learning is a distributed learning method to train a shared model by aggregating the locally-computed gradient updates. In federated learning, bandwidth and privacy are two main concerns of gradient updates transmission. This paper proposes an end-to-end encrypted neural network for gradient updates transmission. This network first encodes the input gradient updates to a lower-dimension space in each client, which significantly mitigates the pressure of data communication in federated learning. The encoded gradient updates are directly recovered as a whole, i.e. the aggregated gradient updates of the trained model, in the decoding layers of the network on the server. In this way, gradient updates encrypted in each client are not only prevented from interception during communication, but also unknown to the server. Based on the encrypted neural network, a novel federated learning framework is designed in real applications. Experimental results show that the proposed network can effectively achieve two goals, privacy protection and data compression, under a little sacrifice of the model accuracy in federated learning.