ADI: Adversarial Dominating Inputs in Vertical Federated Learning Systems

Understand

Vertical federated learning (VFL) system has recently become prominent as a concept to process data distributed across many individual sources without the need to centralize it.

• Multiple participants collaboratively train models based on their local data in a privacy-aware manner.
• To date, VFL has become a de facto solution to securely learn a model among organizations, allowing knowledge to be shared without compromising privacy of any individuals.
• Despite the prosperous development of VFL systems, we find that certain inputs of a participant, named adversarial dominating inputs (ADIs), can dominate the joint inference towards the direction of the adversary's will and force other (victim) participants to make negligible contributions, losing rewards that are usually offered regarding the importance of their contributions in federated learning scenarios.