Improving Availability of Vertical Federated Learning: Relaxing Inference on Non-overlapping Data

Vertical Federated Learning (VFL) enables multiple parties to collaboratively train a machine learning model over vertically distributed datasets without data privacy leakage. However, there is a limitation of the current VFL solutions: current VFL models fail to conduct inference on non-overlapping samples during inference. This limitation seriously damages the VFL model’s availability because, in practice, overlapping samples may only take up a small portion of the whole data at each party which means a large part of inference tasks will fail. In this article, we propose a novel VFL framework which enables federated inference on non-overlapping data. Our framework regards the distributed features as privileged information which is available in the training period but disappears during inference. We distill the knowledge of such privileged features and transfer them to the parties’ local model which only processes local features. Furthermore, we adopt Oblivious Transfer (OT) to preserve data ID privacy during training and inference. Empirically, we evaluate the model on the real-world dataset collected from Criteo and Taobao. Besides, we also provide a security analysis of the proposed framework.