FedSumUp: User-Auditable Privacy-Aware Representation Sharing for Resource-Constrained Federated Intelligence

Abstract

Existing federated data condensation methods face privacy risks, as uploaded synthetic data may preserve sensitive information and remain vulnerable to reconstruction attacks. Moreover, their generation often incurs considerable client-side computational overhead, limiting deployment on resource-constrained devices. To address these issues, we propose FedSumUp, which employs a learnable lossy compressor on clients to generate compact and visually interpretable representations. By controlling information capacity, FedSumUp reduces privacy leakage while allowing users to directly assess the privacy-utility tradeoff. We further introduce a dual-objective optimization mechanism to preserve task-relevant semantics while suppressing reconstruction risks. The compressor is trained on the server and only performs lightweight inference on clients. Since the server cannot access raw data, we develop a data-free closed-loop optimization strategy that optimizes the compressor by minimizing the discrepancy between original and twice-compressed representations after structure-preserving upsampling. Experiments on BloodMNIST, CIFAR-10, and ChestMNIST demonstrate reconstruction PSNR as low as 8.56 dB (with synthetic PSNR as low as 5.45 dB), client runtime reductions up to 96.5% (from 778s to 27s on ChestMNIST), and competitive classification accuracy (89.72% ChestMNIST, 82.24% BloodMNIST, 65.63% CIFAR-10), while remaining inherently robust to non-IID data distributions.