EC-LDA : Label Distribution Inference Attack against Federated Graph Learning with Embedding Compression

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been widely used for graph analysis. Federated Graph Learning (FGL) is an emerging learning framework to collaboratively train graph data from various clients. However, since clients are required to upload model parameters to the server in each round, this provides the server with an opportunity to infer each client's data privacy. In this paper, we focus on label distribution attacks(LDAs) that aim to infer the label distributions of the clients' local data. We take the first step to attack client's label distributions in FGL. Firstly, we observe that the effectiveness of LDA is closely related to the variance of node embeddings in GNNs. Next, we analyze the relation between them and we propose a new attack named EC-LDA, which significantly improves the attack effectiveness by compressing node embeddings. Thirdly, extensive experiments on node classification and link prediction tasks across six widely used graph datasets show that EC-LDA outperforms the SOTA LDAs. For example, EC-LDA attains optimal values under both Cos-sim and JS-div evaluation metrics in the CoraFull and LastFM datasets. Finally, we explore the robustness of EC-LDA under differential privacy protection.

@article{cheng2025_2505.15140,
  title={ EC-LDA : Label Distribution Inference Attack against Federated Graph Learning with Embedding Compression },
  author={ Tong Cheng and Fu Jie and Xinpeng Ling and Huifa Li and Zhili Chen },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.15140},
  year={ 2025 }
}