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Hauptverfasser: Wu, Chia-Yuan, Curtis, Frank E., Robinson, Daniel P.
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08616
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author Wu, Chia-Yuan
Curtis, Frank E.
Robinson, Daniel P.
author_facet Wu, Chia-Yuan
Curtis, Frank E.
Robinson, Daniel P.
contents Collaborative machine learning (CML) enables multiple clients to train a global model jointly in a data-distributed setting. To address data privacy and communication efficiency, one-shot CML has been increasingly adopted, where clients communicate with the server only once by sharing synthetic or processed proxy data. This single-round communication, however, eliminates the possibility of iterative correction at the server, making the learning process particularly vulnerable to client unreliability. In this setting, unreliable clients, whether malicious or non-malicious, may provide biased proxy data that favors certain groups, thereby degrading the fairness of the global model and harming minority or unprivileged groups. In this work, we propose a server-side defense framework based on a bilevel optimization formulation. The proposed approach learns client-level weights to mitigate the influence of biased client proxy data while enforcing fairness constraints by using a very small trusted root dataset available at the server. Experimental results on benchmark datasets show that our method improves fairness with little accuracy loss under biased proxy data contributions from unreliable clients. Moreover, the proposed approach remains effective even when unreliable clients make up a majority of the system, consistently outperforming other existing methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_08616
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Robust Server Defense Against Unreliable Clients in One-Shot Fair Collaborative Machine Learning
Wu, Chia-Yuan
Curtis, Frank E.
Robinson, Daniel P.
Machine Learning
Collaborative machine learning (CML) enables multiple clients to train a global model jointly in a data-distributed setting. To address data privacy and communication efficiency, one-shot CML has been increasingly adopted, where clients communicate with the server only once by sharing synthetic or processed proxy data. This single-round communication, however, eliminates the possibility of iterative correction at the server, making the learning process particularly vulnerable to client unreliability. In this setting, unreliable clients, whether malicious or non-malicious, may provide biased proxy data that favors certain groups, thereby degrading the fairness of the global model and harming minority or unprivileged groups. In this work, we propose a server-side defense framework based on a bilevel optimization formulation. The proposed approach learns client-level weights to mitigate the influence of biased client proxy data while enforcing fairness constraints by using a very small trusted root dataset available at the server. Experimental results on benchmark datasets show that our method improves fairness with little accuracy loss under biased proxy data contributions from unreliable clients. Moreover, the proposed approach remains effective even when unreliable clients make up a majority of the system, consistently outperforming other existing methods.
title Robust Server Defense Against Unreliable Clients in One-Shot Fair Collaborative Machine Learning
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08616