arXiv Machine Learning

A Byzantine-Robust Federated Learning with Nesterov Momentum

The paper introduces Byrd-NAFL, a Byzantine‑robust federated learning algorithm that incorporates Nesterov momentum at the server while keeping workers stateless. It applies any soft γ‑Byzantine resilient aggregation rule and provides finite‑time convergence guarantees for smooth non‑convex losses across all momentum factors β∈[0,1). Experiments on MNIST, CIFAR‑10, and Sentiment140 demonstrate faster convergence and higher accuracy than existing benchmarks under various attacks.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 4

A Nesterov-Accelerated Byzantine-Robust Federated Learning

The paper proposes Byrd-NAFL, a Byzantine‑robust federated learning algorithm that incorporates Nesterov’s momentum and resilient aggregation rules. It achieves fast and safe convergence under non‑convex, smooth loss functions with relaxed gradient assumptions, and provides a finite‑time convergence guarantee. Experiments show that Byrd-NAFL outperforms existing methods in convergence speed, accuracy, and resilience to various malicious attacks.

By Lihan Xu, Xiaoyi Fan, Gang Wang, Runhao Zeng, Xiping Hu, Yanjie Dong
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 2

Robustifying Asynchronous SGD via Soft Throttling

arXiv:2609.39357v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Asynchronous SGD is a popular algorithm for distributed learning where each client's gradient update is applied on arrival. This leads to a speed-up, b...

By Kaoru Otsuka, Maxime Meyer, Yuki Takezawa, Makoto Yamada, Anastasia Koloskova
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 16

SWB-DM: A Calibrated Sliced-Wasserstein-Barycenter Aggregator with Delayed-Momentum Caching for Byzantine-Robust Federated Learning under Partial Participation

The paper introduces SWB-DM, a Byzantine‑robust federated learning aggregator that treats each slice of a client update as a one‑dimensional distribution, computes a trimmed Wasserstein barycenter across clients, and uses a medoid‑based gauge‑fixing step to recover coordinate identity. It further incorporates delayed‑momentum caching to decouple robustness from the specific clients sampled each round. Extensive experiments on CIFAR‑10, CIFAR‑100, FEMNIST, and a 500‑client scalability run reveal distinct failure modes of existing defenses and demonstrate that SWB‑DM achieves significant gains, especially when compared under equal round budgets.

By Saranraj S, Saranya M S, Alex David S, Ajay Kumar A
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 30

Byzantine-Robust Federated Representation Learning

arXiv:2609.36660v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study federated learning (FL) with adversarial clients, where the goal is to minimize the average loss of the honest (non-adversarial) clients witho...

By Leonardo F. Toso, James Anderson, Rafael Pinot, Nirupam Gupta
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 7

Resilience Beyond Stationary Client Unavailability: Unlocking Efficient and Unbiased Federated Learning

The paper introduces FedSWE, a federated learning algorithm designed to handle non‑stationary and heterogeneous client availability without requiring prior real‑time knowledge of which devices are online. FedSWE compensates for missed computations, stabilizes global updates, and mixes local updates through implicit gossiping, all while adding only modest memory and computational overhead. The authors prove that FedSWE converges to a stationary point for non‑convex objectives and achieves linear speedup in certain scenarios, and they validate these claims with experiments on real‑world datasets featuring diverse client unavailability patterns.

By Ming Xiang, Stratis Ioannidis, Edmund Yeh, Carlee Joe-Wong, Lili Su