Papers › Improving (α, f)-Byzantine Resilience in Federated Learning via layerwise aggregation...

Improving (α, f)-Byzantine Resilience in Federated Learning via layerwise aggregation and cosine distance

27 Mar 2025arXiv:2503.21244archive 2025-07-28

Mario García-Márquez, Nuria Rodríguez-Barroso, M. Victoria Luzón, Francisco Herrera

The rapid development of artificial intelligence systems has amplified societal concerns regarding their usage, necessitating regulatory frameworks that encompass data privacy. Federated Learning (FL) is posed as potential solution to data privacy challenges in distributed machine learning by enabling collaborative model training {without data sharing}. However, FL systems remain vulnerable to Byzantine attacks, where malicious nodes contribute corrupted model updates. While Byzantine Resilient operators have emerged as a widely adopted robust aggregation algorithm to mitigate these attacks, its efficacy diminishes significantly in high-dimensional parameter spaces, sometimes leading to poor performing models. This paper introduces Layerwise Cosine Aggregation, a novel aggregation scheme designed to enhance robustness of these rules in such high-dimensional settings while preserving computational efficiency. A theoretical analysis is presented, demonstrating the superior robustness of the proposed Layerwise Cosine Aggregation compared to original robust aggregation operators. Empirical evaluation across diverse image classification datasets, under varying data distributions and Byzantine attack scenarios, consistently demonstrates the improved performance of Layerwise Cosine Aggregation, achieving up to a 16% increase in model accuracy.

PaperPDFCode

Code

ari-dasci/S-layerwise_cosine_aggregation officialmentioned on GitHubpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Computational EfficiencyFederated LearningImage Classificationimage-classification

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections