Billion-scale federated learning on mobile clients: a submodel design with tunable privacy

Federated learning was proposed with an intriguing vision of achieving collaborative machine learning among numerous clients without uploading their private data to a cloud server. However, the conventional framework requires each client to leverage the full model for learning, which can be prohibitively inefficient for large-scale learning tasks and resource-constrained mobile devices. Thus, we proposed a submodel framework, where clients download only the needed parts of the full model, namely, submodels, and then upload the submodel updates. Nevertheless, the "position" of a client's truly required submodel corresponds to its private data, while the disclosure of the true position to the cloud server during interactions inevitably breaks the tenet of federated learning. To integrate efficiency and privacy, we designed a secure federated submodel learning scheme coupled with a private set union protocol as a cornerstone. The secure scheme features the properties of randomized response, secure aggregation, and Bloom filter, and endows each client with customized plausible deniability (in terms of local differential privacy) against the position of its desired submodel, thereby protecting private data. We further instantiated the scheme with Alibaba's e-commerce recommendation, implemented a prototype system, and extensively evaluated over 30-day Taobao user data. Empirical results demonstrate the feasibility and scalability of the proposed scheme as well as its remarkable advantages over the conventional federated learning framework, from model accuracy and convergency, practical communication, computation, and storage overhead.