Generative Gradient Inversion via Over-Parameterized Networks in Federated Learning

Federated learning has gained recognitions as a secure approach for safeguarding local private data in collaborative learning. But the advent of gradient inversion research has posed significant challenges to this premise by enabling a third-party to recover groundtruth images via gradients. While prior research has predominantly focused on low-resolution images and small batch sizes, this study highlights the feasibility of reconstructing complex images with high resolutions and large batch sizes. The success of the proposed method is contingent on constructing an over-parameterized convolutional network, so that images are generated before fitting to the gradient matching requirement. Practical experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves high-fidelity image recovery, surpassing state-of-the-art competitors that commonly fail in more intricate scenarios. Consequently, our study shows that local participants in a federated learning system are vulnerable to potential data leakage issues. Source code is available at https://github.com/czhang024/CI-Net.