The Effect of Quantization in Federated Learning: A Rényi Differential Privacy Perspective

Federated Learning (FL) is an emerging paradigm that holds great promise for privacy-preserving machine learning using distributed data. To enhance privacy, FL can be combined with Differential Privacy (DP), which involves adding Gaussian noise to the model weights. However, FL faces a significant challenge in terms of large communication overhead when transmitting these model weights. To address this issue, quantization is commonly employed. Nevertheless, the presence of quantized Gaussian noise introduces complexities in understanding privacy protection. This research paper investigates the impact of quantization on privacy in FL systems. We examine the privacy guarantees of quantized Gaussian mechanisms using R\'enyi Differential Privacy (RDP). By deriving the privacy budget of quantized Gaussian mechanisms, we demonstrate that lower quantization bit levels provide improved privacy protection. To validate our theoretical findings, we employ Membership Inference Attacks (MIA), which gauge the accuracy of privacy leakage. The numerical results align with our theoretical analysis, confirming that quantization can indeed enhance privacy protection. This study not only enhances our understanding of the correlation between privacy and communication in FL but also underscores the advantages of quantization in preserving privacy.

Optimization of a Real-Time Wavelet-Based Algorithm for Improving Speech Intelligibility

The optimization of a wavelet-based algorithm to improve speech intelligibility is reported. The discrete-time speech signal is split into frequency sub-bands via a multi-level discrete wavelet transform. Various gains are applied to the sub-band signals before they are recombined to form a modified version of the speech. The sub-band gains are adjusted while keeping the overall signal energy unchanged, and the speech intelligibility under various background interference and simulated hearing loss conditions is enhanced and evaluated objectively and quantitatively using Google Speech-to-Text transcription. For English and Chinese noise-free speech, overall intelligibility is improved, and the transcription accuracy can be increased by as much as 80 percentage points by reallocating the spectral energy toward the mid-frequency sub-bands, effectively increasing the consonant-vowel intensity ratio. This is reasonable since the consonants are relatively weak and of short duration, which are therefore the most likely to become indistinguishable in the presence of background noise or high-frequency hearing impairment. For speech already corrupted by noise, improving intelligibility is challenging but still realizable. The proposed algorithm is implementable for real-time signal processing and comparatively simpler than previous algorithms. Potential applications include speech enhancement, hearing aids, machine listening, and a better understanding of speech intelligibility.