{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/on-the-byzantine-resilience-of-distillation","title":"On the Byzantine-Resilience of Distillation-Based Federated Learning","arxiv_id":"2402.12265","date":"2024-02-19","proceeding":null,"authors":["Christophe Roux","Max Zimmer","Sebastian Pokutta"],"abstract":"Federated Learning (FL) algorithms using Knowledge Distillation (KD) have received increasing attention due to their favorable properties with respect to privacy, non-i.i.d. data and communication cost. These methods depart from transmitting model parameters and instead communicate information about a learning task by sharing predictions on a public dataset. In this work, we study the performance of such approaches in the byzantine setting, where a subset of the clients act in an adversarial manner aiming to disrupt the learning process. We show that KD-based FL algorithms are remarkably resilient and analyze how byzantine clients can influence the learning process. Based on these insights, we introduce two new byzantine attacks and demonstrate their ability to break existing byzantine-resilient methods. Additionally, we propose a novel defence method which enhances the byzantine resilience of KD-based FL algorithms. Finally, we provide a general framework to obfuscate attacks, making them significantly harder to detect, thereby improving their effectiveness. Our findings serve as an important building block in the analysis of byzantine FL, contributing through the development of new attacks and new defence mechanisms, further advancing the robustness of KD-based FL algorithms.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.12265v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.12265v3.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"on-the-byzantine-resilience-of-distillation","repo_url":"https://github.com/zib-iol/feddistill","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"federated-learning","task_name":"Federated Learning"},{"task_slug":"knowledge-distillation","task_name":"Knowledge Distillation"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"knowledge-distillation","method_name":"Knowledge Distillation"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2402.12265","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2402.12265","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}