Robust Aggregation for Federated Learning

We present a novel approach to federated learning that endows its aggregation process with greater robustness to potential poisoning of local data or model parameters of participating devices. The proposed approach, Robust Federated Aggregation (RFA), relies on the aggregation of updates using the geometric median, which can be computed efficiently using a Weiszfeld-type algorithm. RFA is agnostic to the level of corruption and aggregates model updates without revealing each device’s individual contribution. We establish the convergence of the robust federated learning algorithm for the stochastic learning of additive models with least squares. We also offer two variants of RFA: a faster one with one-step robust aggregation, and another one with on-device personalization. We present experimental results with additive models and deep networks for three tasks in computer vision and natural language processing. The experiments show that RFA is competitive with the classical aggregation approach when the level of corruption is low, while demonstrating greater robustness when the level of corruption is high.