Low Complexity Byzantine-Resilient Federated Learning

Federated learning (FL) has gained attention for enabling efficient distributed learning while maintaining data privacy. However, the data privacy constraint reduces the transparency in the agents’ model update making the learning process vulnerable to Byzantine attacks. In this paper, a mathematical proof is provided to show that when the traditional model-combining scheme is used, the model will eventually diverge to non-useful solutions in the presence of Byzantine agents independently from their number or their contributions. A low complexity norm-control based aggregation approach is also proposed and shown to converge to the optimal and sub-optimal solutions in the absence or presence of Byzantine nodes, respectively. Monte-Carlo simulations are also conducted to verify and validate the mathematical derivations and the efficiency of the proposed approach in protecting the FL model.