In plain words: In federated learning, many devices train one shared model, so a rogue device can sneak in a corrupted update. The server trains a detector to spot and drop bad updates before averaging. It kept image and text models accurate under random sabotage and backdoor attacks.
Abstract
Federated learning systems are vulnerable to attacks from malicious clients. As the central server in the system cannot govern the behaviors of the clients, a rogue client may initiate an attack by sending malicious model updates to the server, so as to degrade the learning performance or enforce targeted model poisoning attacks (a.k.a. backdoor attacks). Therefore, timely detecting these malicious model updates and the underlying attackers becomes critically important. In this work, we propose a new framework for robust federated learning where the central server learns to detect and remove the malicious model updates using a powerful detection model, leading to targeted defense. We evaluate our solution in both image classification and sentiment analysis tasks with a variety of machine learning models. Experimental results show that our solution ensures robust federated learning that is resilient to both the Byzantine attacks and the targeted model poisoning attacks.
Suyi Li, Yong Cheng, Wei Wang, Yang Liu, Tianjian Chen
arXiv:2002.00211 · cs.LG, cs.CR, stat.ML · submitted Feb 1, 2020
abstract · pdf · html · 7 pages, 5 figures