FedCut: A Spectral Analysis Framework for Reliable Detection of Byzantine Colluders

This paper proposes a general
spectral analysis
framework that thwarts a security risk in federated Learning caused by
groups of malicious Byzantine attackers
or
colluders
, who conspire to upload vicious model updates to severely debase global model performances. The proposed framework delineates the strong consistency and temporal coherence between Byzantine colluders’ model updates from a spectral analysis lens, and, formulates the detection of Byzantine misbehaviours as a
community detection
problem in weighted graphs. The modified normalized graph cut is then utilized to discern attackers from benign participants. Moreover, the
Spectral heuristics
is adopted to make the detection robust against various attacks. The proposed Byzantine colluder resilient method, i.e., FedCut, is guaranteed to converge with bounded errors. Extensive experimental results under a variety of settings justify the superiority of FedCut, which demonstrates extremely robust model accuracy (MA) under various attacks. It was shown that FedCut's averaged MA is 2.1% to 16.5% better than that of the state of the art Byzantine-resilient methods. In terms of the worst-case model accuracy (MA), FedCut is 17.6% to 69.5% better than these methods.