Label Leakage in Vertical Federated Learning: A Survey

Abstract

Vertical federated learning (VFL) is a distributed machine learning paradigm that collaboratively trains models using passive parties with features and an active party with additional labels. While VFL offers privacy preservation through data localization, the threat of label leakage remains a significant challenge. Label leakage occurs due to label inference attacks, where passive parties attempt to infer labels for their privacy and commercial value. Extensive research has been conducted on this specific VFL attack, but a comprehensive summary is still lacking. To bridge this gap, our paper aims to survey the existing label inference attacks and defenses. We propose two new taxonomies for both label inference attacks and defenses, respectively. Beyond summarizing the current state of research, we highlight techniques that we believe hold potential and could significantly influence future studies. Moreover, experimental benchmark datasets and evaluation metrics are summarized to provide a guideline for subsequent work.