Deep Efficient Private Neighbor Generation for Subgraph Federated Learning

Behemoth graphs are often fragmented and separately stored by multiple data owners as distributed subgraphs in many realistic applications. Without harming data privacy, it is natural to consider the subgraph federated learning (subgraph FL) scenario, where each local client holds a subgraph of the entire global graph, to obtain globally generalized graph mining models. To overcome the unique challenge of incomplete information propagation on local subgraphs due to missing cross-subgraph neighbors, previous works resort to the augmentation of local neighborhoods through the joint FL of missing neighbor generators and GNNs. Yet their technical designs have profound limitations regarding the utility, efficiency, and privacy goals of FL. In this work, we propose FedDEP to comprehensively tackle these challenges in subgraph FL. FedDEP consists of a series of novel technical designs: (1) Deep neighbor generation through leveraging the GNN embeddings of potential missing neighbors; (2) Efficient pseudo-FL for neighbor generation through embedding prototyping; and (3) Privacy protection through noise-less edge-local-differential-privacy. We analyze the correctness and efficiency of FedDEP, and provide theoretical guarantees on its privacy. Empirical results on four real-world datasets justify the clear benefits of proposed techniques.