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  4. Byzantine-Robust Federated Learning: Impact of Client Subsampling and Local Updates
 
conference paper not in proceedings

Byzantine-Robust Federated Learning: Impact of Client Subsampling and Local Updates

Allouah, Youssef  
•
Voitovych, Sasha
•
Guerraoui, Rachid  
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2024
41st International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2024

The possibility of adversarial (a.k.a., Byzantine) clients makes federated learning (FL) prone to arbitrary manipulation. The natural approach to robustify FL against adversarial clients is to replace the simple averaging operation at the server in the standard FedAvg algorithm by a robust averaging rule. While a significant amount of work has been devoted to studying the convergence of federated robust averaging (which we denote by FedRo), prior work has largely ignored the impact of client subsampling and local steps, two fundamental FL characteristics. While client subsampling increases the effective fraction of Byzantine clients, local steps increase the drift between the local updates computed by honest (i.e., non-Byzantine) clients. Consequently, a careless deployment of FedRo could yield poor performance. We validate this observation by presenting an in-depth analysis of FedRo tightly analyzing the impact of client subsampling and local steps. Specifically, we present a sufficient condition on client subsampling for nearly-optimal convergence of FedRo (for smooth non-convex loss). Also, we show that the rate of improvement in learning accuracy diminishes with respect to the number of clients subsampled, as soon as the sample size exceeds a threshold value. Interestingly, we also observe that under a careful choice of step-sizes, the learning error due to Byzantine clients decreases with the number of local steps. We validate our theory by experiments on the FEMNIST and CIFAR-10 image classification tasks.

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Type
conference paper not in proceedings
Author(s)
Allouah, Youssef  

EPFL

Voitovych, Sasha

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Guerraoui, Rachid  

EPFL

Gupta, Nirupam  
Farhadkhani, Sadegh  

EPFL

Rizk, Geovani  

EPFL

Pinot, Rafaël  
Date Issued

2024

URL

View on icml.cc

https://icml.cc/virtual/2024/poster/34407
Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
DCL  
Event nameEvent acronymEvent placeEvent date
41st International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2024

ICML'24

Vienna, Austria

2024-07-21 - 2024-07-24

Available on Infoscience
March 14, 2025
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/247791
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