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The paper reviews the state of robustness in Federated Learning (FL), highlighting its vulnerability to performance degradation, data theft, and aggregation attacks. It presents a comprehensive framework that includes a threat-centric view of attack surfaces, a taxonomy of robust aggregation methods (distinguishing outcome‑centric from security‑centric approaches), and a layered taxonomy of defensive strategies. The authors also scrutinize current evaluation practices and outline key applications and open research challenges to steer future work.
The paper introduces DP‑BR‑FedAvg, a federated learning framework that combines Gaussian‑mechanism differential privacy with a coordinate‑wise trimmed‑mean Byzantine‑robust aggregation rule. It is evaluated on a simulated cross‑institutional classification task involving fraud and clinical‑risk scoring, where it improves the F1‑score for a minority class from 0.030 (plain FedAvg) to 0.119 while bounding privacy loss. The study demonstrates that privacy and robustness mechanisms interact, and that system design for regulated, adversarial, cross‑institutional settings must account for this interaction.
arXiv:2509. 11974v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative model training among clients without centralising data, making it a widely adopted privacy-enhancing technology (PET).
The paper introduces DP‑BR‑FedAvg, a federated learning framework that combines Gaussian‑mechanism differential privacy with a coordinate‑wise trimmed‑mean Byzantine‑robust aggregation rule. It is evaluated on a simulated cross‑institutional classification task for fraud and clinical‑risk scoring, showing that plain FedAvg fails when a quarter of twenty clients are Byzantine, while DP‑BR‑FedAvg recovers more signal and bounds privacy loss. The study demonstrates that privacy and robustness interact, and system design for regulated, adversarial, cross‑institutional settings must account for this interaction.
arXiv:2608. 01095v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Federated learning (FL) enables multiple intelligent devices to collaboratively train a high-accuracy model without sharing raw data.
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.