Federated Morozov Regularization for Shortcut Learning in Privacy Preserving Learning with Watermarked Image Data

Federated learning is a promising privacy-preserving learning paradigm in which multiple clients can collaboratively learn a model with their image data kept local. For protecting data ownership, personalized watermarks are usually added to the image data by each client. However, the introduced watermarks can lead to a shortcut learning problem, where the learned model performs predictions over-rely on the simple watermark-related features and represents a low accuracy on real-world data. Existing works assume the central server can directly access the predefined shortcut features during the training process. However, these may fail in the federated learning setting as the shortcut features of the heterogeneous watermarked data are difficult to obtain.

In this paper, we propose a federated Morozov regularization technique, where the regularization parameter can be adaptively determined based on the watermark knowledge of all the clients in a privacy-preserving way, to eliminate the shortcut learning problem caused by the watermarked data. Specifically, federated Morozov regularization firstly performs lightweight local watermark mask estimation in each client to obtain the locations and intensities knowledge of local watermarks. Then, it aggregates the estimated local watermark masks to generate the global watermark knowledge with a weighted averaging. Finally, federated Morozov regularization determines the regularization parameter for each client by combining the local and global watermark knowledge. With the regularization parameter determined, the model is trained as normal federated learning. We implement and evaluate federated Morozov regularization based on a real-world deployment of federated learning on 40 Jetson devices with real-world datasets. The results show that federated Morozov regularization improves model accuracy by 11.22% compared to existing baselines.