Mitigating Byzantine Attacks in Federated Learning
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Prior solutions for mitigating Byzantine failures in federated learning, such as element-wise median of the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) based updates from the clients, tend to leverage the similarity of updates from the non-Byzantine clients. However, when data is non-IID, as is typical in mobile networks, the updates received from non-Byzantine clients are quite diverse, resulting in poor convergence performance of such approaches. On the other hand, current algorithms that address heterogeneous data distribution across clients are limited in scope and do not perform well when there is variability in the number and identities of the Byzantine clients, or when general non-convex loss functions are considered. We propose `DiverseFL' that jointly addresses three key challenges of Byzantine resilient federated learning – (i) non-IID data distribution across clients, (ii) variable Byzantine fault model, and (iii) generalization to non-convex and non-smooth optimization. DiverseFL leverages computing capability of the federated learning server that for each iteration, computes a `guiding' gradient for each client over a tiny sample of data received only once from the client before start of the training. The server uses `per client' criteria for flagging Byzantine clients, by comparing the corresponding guiding gradient with the client's gradient update. The server then updates the model using the gradients received from the non-flagged clients. As we demonstrate in our experiments with benchmark datasets and popular Byzantine attacks, our proposed approach performs better than the prior algorithms, almost matching the performance of the `Oracle SGD', where the server knows the identities of the Byzantine clients.
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