Privacy-Preserving Collaborative Learning With Linear Communication Complexity

Collaborative machine learning enables privacy-preserving training of machine learning models without collecting sensitive client data. Despite recent breakthroughs, communication bottleneck is still a major challenge against its scalability to larger networks. To address this challenge, in this work we propose PICO, the first collaborative learning framework with linear communication complexity, significantly improving over the quadratic state-of-the-art, under formal information-theoretic privacy guarantees. Theoretical analysis demonstrates that PICO slashes the communication cost while achieving equal computational complexity, adversary resilience, robustness to client dropouts, and model accuracy to the state-of-the-art. Extensive experiments demonstrate up to 91x reduction in the communication overhead, and up to 8x speed-up in the wall-clock training time compared to the state-of-the-art. As such, PICO addresses a key technical challenge in multi-party collaborative learning, paving the way for future large-scale privacy-preserving learning frameworks.