Safeguarding Federated Learning From Data Reconstruction Attacks via Gradient Dropout

Federated learning (collaborative model training where participants share only gradients, not raw data) is vulnerable to gradient inversion attacks, where adversaries reconstruct sensitive training data from the shared gradients. The paper proposes Gradient Dropout, a defense that randomly scales some gradient components and replaces others with Gaussian noise (random numerical values) to disrupt reconstruction attempts while maintaining model accuracy.