FedMPQ: Secure and Communication-Efficient Federated Learning with Multi-codebook Product Quantization

Abstract: In federated learning, particularly in cross-device scenarios, secure aggregation has recently gained popularity as it effectively defends against inference attacks by malicious aggregators. However, secure aggregation often requires additional communication overhead and can impede the convergence rate of the global model, which is particularly challenging in wireless network environments with extremely limited bandwidth. Therefore, achieving efficient communication compression under the premise of secure aggregation presents a highly challenging and valuable problem. In this work, we propose a novel uplink communication compression method for federated learning, named FedMPQ, which is based on multi shared codebook product quantization.Specifically, we utilize updates from the previous round to generate sufficiently robust codebooks. Secure aggregation is then achieved through trusted execution environments (TEE) or a trusted third party (TTP).In contrast to previous works, our approach exhibits greater robustness in scenarios where data is not independently and identically distributed (non-IID) and there is a lack of sufficient public data. The experiments conducted on the LEAF dataset demonstrate that our proposed method achieves 99% of the baseline's final accuracy, while reducing uplink communications by 90-95%