Sparsification Under Siege: Dual-Level Defense Against Poisoning in Communication-Efficient Federated Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Jin, Zhiyong, Xu, Runhua, Li, Chao, Liu, Yizhong, Li, Jianxin, Joshi, James
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Jin, Zhiyong
Xu, Runhua
Li, Chao
Liu, Yizhong
Li, Jianxin
Joshi, James
author_facet Jin, Zhiyong
Xu, Runhua
Li, Chao
Liu, Yizhong
Li, Jianxin
Joshi, James
contents Gradient sparsification, while mitigating communication bottlenecks in Federated Learning (FL), fundamentally alters the geometric landscape of model updates. We reveal that the resultant high-dimensional orthogonality renders traditional Euclidean-based robust aggregation metrics mathematically ambiguous, creating a 'sparsity-robustness trade-off' that adversaries exploit to bypass detection. To resolve this structural dissonance, we propose SafeSparse, a consensus restoration framework that decouples defense into topological and semantic dimensions. Unlike prior arts that treat sparsification and security orthogonally, SafeSparse introduces: (1) a Structure-Aware Calibration mechanism utilizing Jaccard similarity to filter topological outliers induced by index poisoning; and (2) a Directional Semantic Alignment module employing density-based clustering on update signs to neutralize magnitude-invariant attacks. Theoretically, we establish convergence guarantees for SafeSparse. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets and attack scenarios demonstrate that SafeSparse recovers up to 25.7% global accuracy under coordinated poisoning, effectively closing the vulnerability gap in communication-efficient FL.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_01454
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Sparsification Under Siege: Dual-Level Defense Against Poisoning in Communication-Efficient Federated Learning
Jin, Zhiyong
Xu, Runhua
Li, Chao
Liu, Yizhong
Li, Jianxin
Joshi, James
Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
Gradient sparsification, while mitigating communication bottlenecks in Federated Learning (FL), fundamentally alters the geometric landscape of model updates. We reveal that the resultant high-dimensional orthogonality renders traditional Euclidean-based robust aggregation metrics mathematically ambiguous, creating a 'sparsity-robustness trade-off' that adversaries exploit to bypass detection. To resolve this structural dissonance, we propose SafeSparse, a consensus restoration framework that decouples defense into topological and semantic dimensions. Unlike prior arts that treat sparsification and security orthogonally, SafeSparse introduces: (1) a Structure-Aware Calibration mechanism utilizing Jaccard similarity to filter topological outliers induced by index poisoning; and (2) a Directional Semantic Alignment module employing density-based clustering on update signs to neutralize magnitude-invariant attacks. Theoretically, we establish convergence guarantees for SafeSparse. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets and attack scenarios demonstrate that SafeSparse recovers up to 25.7% global accuracy under coordinated poisoning, effectively closing the vulnerability gap in communication-efficient FL.
title Sparsification Under Siege: Dual-Level Defense Against Poisoning in Communication-Efficient Federated Learning
topic Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.01454