Empirical Analysis of Privacy-Fairness-Accuracy Trade-offs in Federated Learning: A Step Towards Responsible AI

Abstract

Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative machine learning while preserving data privacy but struggles to balance privacy preservation (PP) and fairness. Techniques like Differential Privacy (DP), Homomorphic Encryption (HE), and Secure Multi-Party Computation (SMC) protect sensitive data but introduce trade-offs. DP enhances privacy but can disproportionately impact underrepresented groups, while HE and SMC mitigate fairness concerns at the cost of computational overhead. This work explores the privacy-fairness trade-offs in FL under IID (Independent and Identically Distributed) and non-IID data distributions, benchmarking q-FedAvg, q-MAML, and Ditto on diverse datasets. Our findings highlight context-dependent trade-offs and offer guidelines for designing FL systems that uphold responsible AI principles, ensuring fairness, privacy, and equitable real-world applications.

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