Topology-aware Differential Privacy for Decentralized Image Classification

Understand

In this paper, we design Top-DP, a novel solution to optimize the differential privacy protection of decentralized image classification systems.

• The key insight of our solution is to leverage the unique features of decentralized communication topologies to reduce the noise scale and improve the model usability.
• (1) We enhance the DP-SGD algorithm with this topology-aware noise reduction strategy, and integrate the time-aware noise decay technique.
• (2) We design two novel learning protocols (synchronous and asynchronous) to protect systems with different network connectivities and topologies.