Communication efficiency and privacy protection are two critical issues in
distributed machine learning. Existing methods tackle these two issues
separately and may have a high implementation complexity that constrains their
application in a resource-limited environment. We propose a comprehensive
quantization-based solution that could simultaneously achieve communication
efficiency and privacy protection, providing new insights into the correlated
nature of communication and privacy. Specifically, we demonstrate the
effectiveness of our proposed solutions in the distributed stochastic gradient
descent (SGD) framework by adding binomial noise to the uniformly quantized
gradients to reach the desired differential privacy level but with a minor
sacrifice in communication efficiency. We theoretically capture the new
trade-offs between communication, privacy, and learning performance.

提出了一种量化解决方案，该方案能够同时实现通信效率和隐私保护，并通过在分布式随机梯度下降框架中将二项式噪声加入到均匀量化的梯度中来证明其有效性，从而在通信、隐私和学习性能之间实现新的平衡。