Robust Federated Learning under Adversarial Attacks via Loss-Based Client Clustering

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Kritharakis, Emmanouil, Jakovetic, Dusan, Makris, Antonios, Tserpes, Konstantinos
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866917444360077312
author Kritharakis, Emmanouil
Jakovetic, Dusan
Makris, Antonios
Tserpes, Konstantinos
author_facet Kritharakis, Emmanouil
Jakovetic, Dusan
Makris, Antonios
Tserpes, Konstantinos
contents Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative model training across multiple clients without sharing private data. We consider FL scenarios wherein FL clients are subject to adversarial (Byzantine) attacks, while the FL server is trusted (honest) and has a trustworthy side dataset. This may correspond to, e.g., cases where the server possesses trusted data prior to federation, or to the presence of a trusted client that temporarily assumes the server role. Our approach requires only two honest participants, i.e., the server and one client, to function effectively, without prior knowledge of the number of malicious clients. Theoretical analysis demonstrates bounded optimality gaps even under strong Byzantine attacks. Experimental results show that our algorithm significantly outperforms standard and robust FL baselines such as Mean, Trimmed Mean, Median, Krum, and Multi-Krum under various attack strategies including label flipping, sign flipping, and Gaussian noise addition across MNIST, FMNIST, and CIFAR-10 benchmarks using the Flower framework.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_12672
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Robust Federated Learning under Adversarial Attacks via Loss-Based Client Clustering
Kritharakis, Emmanouil
Jakovetic, Dusan
Makris, Antonios
Tserpes, Konstantinos
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative model training across multiple clients without sharing private data. We consider FL scenarios wherein FL clients are subject to adversarial (Byzantine) attacks, while the FL server is trusted (honest) and has a trustworthy side dataset. This may correspond to, e.g., cases where the server possesses trusted data prior to federation, or to the presence of a trusted client that temporarily assumes the server role. Our approach requires only two honest participants, i.e., the server and one client, to function effectively, without prior knowledge of the number of malicious clients. Theoretical analysis demonstrates bounded optimality gaps even under strong Byzantine attacks. Experimental results show that our algorithm significantly outperforms standard and robust FL baselines such as Mean, Trimmed Mean, Median, Krum, and Multi-Krum under various attack strategies including label flipping, sign flipping, and Gaussian noise addition across MNIST, FMNIST, and CIFAR-10 benchmarks using the Flower framework.
title Robust Federated Learning under Adversarial Attacks via Loss-Based Client Clustering
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12672