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Paper · 2205.08514 · NeurIPS · 2022

Recovering Private Text in Federated Learning of Language Models

Yangsibo Huang, Kai Li, Danqi Chen, Samyak Gupta, Zexuan Zhong, Tianyu Gao

arXiv · PDF · Open in the Atlas

Code that ran

We lifted 8 functions out of this paper's own repositories and ran 5 of them in a sandbox. "Ran" means the function executed on a synthesized input and returned a value. It is not a reproduction of the paper's results.

RepositoryRoleRan
princeton-sysml/film canonical 5 of 8
FunctionStatusWhere it lives
calculatePerplexity Ran princeton-sysml/film/reorder.py
code served (permissive licence) · get_code("2506162f964eed68")
ibis Ran princeton-sysml/film/reorder.py
code served (permissive licence) · get_code("30062ec641d7c6e1")
shard_sequence_using_eos Ran princeton-sysml/film/reorder.py
code served (permissive licence) · get_code("09f1ec0ed6850234")
shuffle_proposals Ran princeton-sysml/film/reorder.py
code served (permissive licence) · get_code("7b09c74c1f6987a0")
shuffle_proposals_rand Ran princeton-sysml/film/reorder.py
code served (permissive licence) · get_code("6d0e59be9216d2ac")
get_grad_gpt2 Not yet run princeton-sysml/film/reorder.py
code served (permissive licence) · get_code("7cecdfca7a210f88")
ibisAlgorithm Not yet run princeton-sysml/film/reorder.py
code served (permissive licence) · get_code("45a5586b7fa0bff9")
score Not yet run princeton-sysml/film/reorder.py
code served (permissive licence) · get_code("b902d2253e571934")

Repositories linked to this paper

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Abstract

Federated learning allows distributed users to collaboratively train a model while keeping each user's data private. Recently, a growing body of work has demonstrated that an eavesdropping attacker can effectively recover image data from gradients transmitted during federated learning. However, little progress has been made in recovering text data. In this paper, we present a novel attack method FILM for federated learning of language models (LMs). For the first time, we show the feasibility of recovering text from large batch sizes of up to 128 sentences. Unlike image-recovery methods that are optimized to match gradients, we take a distinct approach that first identifies a set of words from gradients and then directly reconstructs sentences based on beam search and a prior-based reordering strategy. We conduct the FILM attack on several large-scale datasets and show that it can successfully reconstruct single sentences with high fidelity for large batch sizes and even multiple sentences if applied iteratively. We evaluate three defense methods: gradient pruning, DPSGD, and a simple approach to freeze word embeddings that we propose. We show that both gradient pruning and DPSGD lead to a significant drop in utility. However, if we fine-tune a public pre-trained LM on private text without updating word embeddings, it can effectively defend the attack with minimal data utility loss. Together, we hope that our results can encourage the community to rethink the privacy concerns of LM training and its standard practices in the future. 2 * The first two authors contributed equally.

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