arXiv Machine Learning

Targeted Label-Flipping and Oversampling Attacks on Federated Conditional GANs

arXiv:2608. 09314v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In a federated learning setup for GANs, several adversarial attacks are possible.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

Approaching the Harm of Gradient Attacks While Only Flipping Labels

The paper investigates the impact of label‑flipping attacks on distributed machine learning, where an adversary can only flip a limited number of training labels. It formalizes the attack as a per‑round constrained optimization problem, derives a greedy label‑selection rule for logistic regression, and shows that this rule is provably optimal under mean aggregation. Experiments demonstrate that optimized label flipping can significantly degrade model accuracy, outperforming random flips, and that the attack transfers to other robust aggregators such as coordinate‑wise median and trimmed mean.

By Abdessamad El-Kabid, El-Mahdi El-Mhamdi
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 23

FedNIA: Noise-Induced Activation Analysis for Mitigating Data Poisoning in Federated Learning

FedNIA is a defense framework for federated learning that identifies and excludes malicious clients without needing a central test dataset. It works by injecting random noise inputs and analyzing layerwise activation patterns with an autoencoder to detect abnormal behaviors caused by data poisoning. The method can counter various attack types—including sample poisoning, label flipping, and backdoors—even when multiple attackers collaborate, and shows strong performance on non‑iid federated datasets.

By Ehsan Hallaji, Roozbeh Razavi-Far, Mehrdad Saif
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 25

BRFID: Toward Byzantine-Robust Federated Intrusion Detection

The paper investigates the effects of label‑flipping poisoning attacks in a three‑client federated intrusion detection system (IDS) trained on CICIDS2017 with non‑IID attack subtype distributions. Flipping 60% of training labels from a single Byzantine client reduces the attacker’s own detection accuracy from 99.96% to 84.33%, while the federated global ensemble remains stable across all tested poison rates. The study shows that the self‑compromise signal can be detected as an anomaly, enabling Byzantine client identification without target data exfiltration, and notes that the current aggregation uses a Federated Forest rather than FedAvg, with future work planned to extend to parametric classifiers.

By Asmah Muallem, Firdous Kausar, Sajid Hussain, Lei Qian
arXiv AI
Sep 11

Cascading Gradient Inversion via LT-Code Inspired Peeling in Federated Learning

The paper introduces a new gradient inversion attack for federated learning that leverages concepts from erasure‑correcting codes to recover entire training batches and their labels from a single FedSGD round. Unlike previous analytic attacks, this method can exactly reconstruct batches of up to 128 samples on ImageNet and achieves over 90% recovery even when the attacker actively manipulates the model. The study demonstrates that federated learning’s privacy leakage is far greater than previously estimated.

By Saeed Shariati, Mohsen Alambardar Meybodi
arXiv AI
Sep 18

Information-Geometric Inverse Distillation for Enhancing Adversarial Transferability

The paper introduces Inverse Knowledge Distillation (IKD), an attack‑agnostic technique that enhances adversarial transferability by maximizing the discrepancy between benign and adversarial prediction distributions on a surrogate model. IKD employs a CE/KL‑equivalent soft‑label objective to push adversarial predictions away from a fixed benign anchor, leveraging Fisher‑sensitive surrogate directions. The authors provide theoretical analysis showing CE and KL induce identical gradients, derive a lower bound on Fisher‑subspace overlap, and demonstrate through extensive ImageNet experiments that IKD consistently improves black‑box attack performance across CNN, ViT, and defended models.

By Wenyuan Wu, Yuan Sun, Yingke Chen, Chao Su, Xi Peng, Dezhong Peng, Xu Wang
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

EmbeddGAN: A Novel GAN Framework Using an Embedding Network and Gini Distance Correlation

EmbeddGAN introduces a new GAN framework that replaces the traditional discriminator with an embedding network trained to maximize statistical dependence between embeddings and real/fake labels using Gini distance correlation (gCor). The generator simultaneously minimizes this dependence, encouraging real and generated samples to become indistinguishable in the learned low‑dimensional embedding space. Experiments on MNIST, CIFAR‑10, and CelebA show competitive performance and notably more stable training dynamics compared to established baselines.

By MaTais Caldwell, Yixin Chen, Xin Dang, Charles Walter
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 8

Imbalance-Robust and Sampling-Efficient Continuous Conditional GANs via Adaptive Vicinal Learning and Auxiliary Regularization

arXiv:2508. 01725v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent advances in continuous conditional generative modeling, including Continuous conditional Generative Adversarial Network (CcGAN) and Continuous Conditional Diffusion Model (CCDM), estimate high-dimensional data distributions conditioned on scalar regression labels such as angles, ages, or temperatures.

By Xin Ding, Yun Chen, Yongwei Wang, Kao Zhang, Sen Zhang, Peibei Cao, Xiangxue Wang
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

Rethinking the Transferable Adversarial Attacks and Robust Defense in Federated Learning

The paper investigates how adversarial examples transfer between client models in federated learning and explores the relationship between these examples and client data distributions. It proposes a defense strategy based on adversarial training that leverages the transferability of model robustness. Experiments on real-life datasets demonstrate that the new attack and defense methods outperform existing state‑of‑the‑art approaches.

By Zuobin Xiong, Deval Mukherjee, Homook Cho, Wei Li