CLDP-pFedAvg: Safeguarding Client Data Privacy in Personalized Federated Averaging

Abstract

The personalized federated averaging algorithm integrates a federated averaging approach with a model-agnostic meta-learning technique. In real-world heterogeneous scenarios, it is essential to implement additional privacy protection techniques for personalized federated learning. We propose a novel differentially private federated meta-learning scheme, CLDP-pFedAvg, which achieves client-level differential privacy guarantees for federated learning involving large heterogeneous clients. The client-level differentially private meta-based FedAvg algorithm enables clients to upload local model parameters for aggregation securely. Furthermore, we provide a convergence analysis of the clipping-enabled differentially private meta-based FedAvg algorithm. The proposed strategy is evaluated across various datasets, and the findings indicate that our approach offers improved privacy protection while maintaining model accuracy.

Keywords

• personalized federated averaging
• client-level differential privacy
• meta-learning