arXiv AI

dSTAR: Straggler Tolerant and Byzantine Resilient Distributed SGD

arXiv:2412. 07151v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Distributed model training needs to be adapted to challenges such as the straggler effect and Byzantine attacks.

arXiv Machine Learning
2d ago

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 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 AI
Sep 24

When Clients Are Orchestrated: Strategic Gradient Manipulation to Defeat Federated Learning Servers with Efficient Defense

The paper introduces Fed-ADR, a coordinated attack framework where a malicious orchestrator server directs heterogeneous adversarial clients to adapt their gradient updates in real time, thereby evading existing federated learning defenses and drastically reducing global model accuracy. It also presents a lightweight detection mechanism that estimates true client gradients from historical data to spot coordinated attacks, and an in-situ recovery method that restores model performance without restarting training. Experiments on MNIST, Fashion‑MNIST, and CIFAR‑10 show the attack can drop accuracy from over 90% to below 10%, while the defense can recover accuracy to above 90% within a few rounds at a computational cost at least 20× lower than retraining from scratch.

By Mohamed Shaaban, Ahmed Abdelnaby, Mohamed Elmahallawy
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

Robust Decentralized Federated Distillation via Multi-Modality Knowledge Collaboration

The paper introduces a robust decentralized federated distillation approach that allows heterogeneous client models to collaborate using predictions on shared unlabeled public data. Each client evaluates received predictions across three modalities—class prediction, boundary decision, and prediction correlation—filters unreliable clients, assigns reliability-based weights, and constructs modality-specific teachers. The method validates distillation gradients against supervised gradients from private data, removes conflicting gradients, and proves convergence under Byzantine attacks, achieving improved accuracy on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 under non‑IID data and malicious conditions.

By Xiao Ma, Hong Shen, Hui Tian, Wei Ke, Wenqi Lyu
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 23

Communication-Efficient Byzantine-Robust Federated Conformal Prediction via Partial Sharing

PRISM‑FCP is a federated conformal prediction framework that achieves Byzantine robustness while reducing communication costs. It does so by partially sharing model updates—transmitting only a subset of parameters per round—to dampen the influence of poisoned clients during training, and by filtering out suspected Byzantine clients during calibration using histogram‑based techniques. Experiments on synthetic data and UCI datasets show that PRISM‑FCP maintains near‑nominal coverage and offers favorable trade‑offs between communication overhead and predictive performance.

By Ehsan Lari, Reza Arablouei, Stefan Werner
arXiv Machine Learning
4d ago

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