Mathematical Biosciences and Engineering (Jan 2022)

Byzantine-robust federated learning via credibility assessment on non-IID data

  • Kun Zhai,
  • Qiang Ren,
  • Junli Wang,
  • Chungang Yan

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3934/mbe.2022078
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 19, no. 2
pp. 1659 – 1676

Abstract

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Federated learning is a novel framework that enables resource-constrained edge devices to jointly learn a model, which solves the problem of data protection and data islands. However, standard federated learning is vulnerable to Byzantine attacks, which will cause the global model to be manipulated by the attacker or fail to converge. On non-iid data, the current methods are not effective in defensing against Byzantine attacks. In this paper, we propose a Byzantine-robust framework for federated learning via credibility assessment on non-iid data (BRCA). Credibility assessment is designed to detect Byzantine attacks by combing adaptive anomaly detection model and data verification. Specially, an adaptive mechanism is incorporated into the anomaly detection model for the training and prediction of the model. Simultaneously, a unified update algorithm is given to guarantee that the global model has a consistent direction. On non-iid data, our experiments demonstrate that the BRCA is more robust to Byzantine attacks compared with conventional methods.

Keywords