APRIL: Finding the Achilles' Heel on Privacy for Vision Transformers

Jiahao Lu, Xi Sheryl Zhang, Tianli Zhao, Xiangyu He, Jian Cheng; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2022, pp. 10051-10060

Federated learning frameworks typically require collaborators to share their local gradient updates of a common model instead of sharing training data to preserve privacy. However, prior works on Gradient Leakage Attacks showed that private training data can be revealed from gradients. So far almost all relevant works base their attacks on fully-connected or convolutional neural networks. Given the recent overwhelmingly rising trend of adapting Transformers to solve multifarious vision tasks, it is highly important to investigate the privacy risk of vision transformers. In this paper, we analyse the gradient leakage risk of self-attention based mechanism in both theoretical and practical manners. Particularly, we propose APRIL - Attention PRIvacy Leakage, which poses a strong threat to self-attention inspired models such as ViT. Showing how vision Transformers are at the risk of privacy leakage via gradients, we urge the significance of designing privacy-safer Transformer models and defending schemes.