SSGD: A Safe and Efficient Method of Gradient Descent

With the vigorous development of artificial intelligence technology, various engineering technology applications have been implemented one after another. The gradient descent method plays an important role in solving various optimization problems, due to its simple structure, good stability, and easy implementation. However, in multinode machine learning system, the gradients usually need to be shared, which will cause privacy leakage, because attackers can infer training data with the gradient information. In this paper, to prevent gradient leakage while keeping the accuracy of the model, we propose the super stochastic gradient descent approach to update parameters by concealing the modulus length of gradient vectors and converting it or them into a unit vector. Furthermore, we analyze the security of super stochastic gradient descent approach and demonstrate that our algorithm can defend against the attacks on the gradient. Experiment results show that our approach is obviously superior to prevalent gradient descent approaches in terms of accuracy, robustness, and adaptability to large-scale batches. Interestingly, our algorithm can also resist model poisoning attacks to a certain extent.