FedGreed: A Byzantine-Robust Loss-Based Aggregation Method for Federated Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Kritharakis, Emmanouil, Makris, Antonios, Jakovetic, Dusan, Tserpes, Konstantinos
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Kritharakis, Emmanouil
Makris, Antonios
Jakovetic, Dusan
Tserpes, Konstantinos
author_facet Kritharakis, Emmanouil
Makris, Antonios
Jakovetic, Dusan
Tserpes, Konstantinos
contents Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative model training across multiple clients while preserving data privacy by keeping local datasets on-device. In this work, we address FL settings where clients may behave adversarially, exhibiting Byzantine attacks, while the central server is trusted and equipped with a reference dataset. We propose FedGreed, a resilient aggregation strategy for federated learning that does not require any assumptions about the fraction of adversarial participants. FedGreed orders clients' local model updates based on their loss metrics evaluated against a trusted dataset on the server and greedily selects a subset of clients whose models exhibit the minimal evaluation loss. Unlike many existing approaches, our method is designed to operate reliably under heterogeneous (non-IID) data distributions, which are prevalent in real-world deployments. FedGreed exhibits convergence guarantees and bounded optimality gaps under strong adversarial behavior. Experimental evaluations on MNIST, FMNIST, and CIFAR-10 demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms standard and robust federated learning baselines, such as Mean, Trimmed Mean, Median, Krum, and Multi-Krum, in the majority of adversarial scenarios considered, including label flipping and Gaussian noise injection attacks. All experiments were conducted using the Flower federated learning framework.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_18060
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle FedGreed: A Byzantine-Robust Loss-Based Aggregation Method for Federated Learning
Kritharakis, Emmanouil
Makris, Antonios
Jakovetic, Dusan
Tserpes, Konstantinos
Machine Learning
Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative model training across multiple clients while preserving data privacy by keeping local datasets on-device. In this work, we address FL settings where clients may behave adversarially, exhibiting Byzantine attacks, while the central server is trusted and equipped with a reference dataset. We propose FedGreed, a resilient aggregation strategy for federated learning that does not require any assumptions about the fraction of adversarial participants. FedGreed orders clients' local model updates based on their loss metrics evaluated against a trusted dataset on the server and greedily selects a subset of clients whose models exhibit the minimal evaluation loss. Unlike many existing approaches, our method is designed to operate reliably under heterogeneous (non-IID) data distributions, which are prevalent in real-world deployments. FedGreed exhibits convergence guarantees and bounded optimality gaps under strong adversarial behavior. Experimental evaluations on MNIST, FMNIST, and CIFAR-10 demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms standard and robust federated learning baselines, such as Mean, Trimmed Mean, Median, Krum, and Multi-Krum, in the majority of adversarial scenarios considered, including label flipping and Gaussian noise injection attacks. All experiments were conducted using the Flower federated learning framework.
title FedGreed: A Byzantine-Robust Loss-Based Aggregation Method for Federated Learning
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18060