Federated Node Classification over Distributed Ego-Networks with Secure Contrastive Embedding Sharing

Federated learning on graphs (a.k.a., federated graph learning- FGL) has recently received increasing attention due to its capacity to enable collaborative learning over distributed graph datasets without compromising local clients' data privacy. In previous works, clients of FGL typically represent institutes or organizations that possess sets of entire graphs (e.g., molecule graphs in biochemical research) or parts of a larger graph (e.g., sub-user networks of e-commerce platforms). However, another natural paradigm exists where clients act as remote devices retaining the graph structures of local neighborhoods centered around the device owners (i.e., ego-networks), which can be modeled for specific graph applications such as user profiling on social ego-networks and infection prediction on contact ego-networks. FGL in such novel yet realistic ego-network settings faces the unique challenge of incomplete neighborhood information for non-ego local nodes since they likely appear and have different sets of neighbors in multiple ego-networks. To address this challenge, we propose an FGL method for distributed ego-networks in which clients obtain complete neighborhood information of local nodes through sharing node embeddings with other clients. A contrastive learning mechanism is proposed to bridge the gap between local and global node embeddings and stabilize the local training of graph neural network models, while a secure embedding sharing protocol is employed to protect individual node identity and embedding privacy against the server and other clients. Comprehensive experiments on various distributed ego-network datasets successfully demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed embedding sharing method on top of different federated model sharing frameworks, and we also provide discussions on the potential efficiency and privacy drawbacks of the method as well as their future mitigation.