Data Reconstruction and Protection in Federated Learning for Fine-Tuning Large Language Models
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Federated learning can facilitate multiple parties to train a shared model on their own private data in a communication-efficient manner. It offers significant benefits for fine-tuning pre-trained large language models, as it supports distributed fine-tuning with a wider range of diverse data while preserving data privacy. However, recent research has revealed a potential privacy vulnerability in federated learning, specifically in the sharing of gradients from clients to server. This vulnerability can lead to the leakage of training data for Transformer-based large language models, thereby allowing the recovery of textual data. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of the effectiveness of the state-of-the-art gradient leakage attacks on textual data within the context of fine-tuning large language models. Our findings reveal that the key element for the attack's success — the target gradient — is not as readily obtainable for the adversary as previously assumed, particularly in regards to the Transformer architecture and practical federated learning settings. A technical error in their implementations has inadvertently caused the gradient to become more associated with the target data than intended. With the error fixed and when following the conventional federated learning framework, gradient leakage attacks pose minimal threats to large language models.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it