English

Private Aggregation for Byzantine-Resilient Heterogeneous Federated Learning

Machine Learning 2025-06-12 v1 Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing Information Theory math.IT Machine Learning

Abstract

Ensuring resilience to Byzantine clients while maintaining the privacy of the clients' data is a fundamental challenge in federated learning (FL). When the clients' data is homogeneous, suitable countermeasures were studied from an information-theoretic perspective utilizing secure aggregation techniques while ensuring robust aggregation of the clients' gradients. However, the countermeasures used fail when the clients' data is heterogeneous. Suitable pre-processing techniques, such as nearest neighbor mixing, were recently shown to enhance the performance of those countermeasures in the heterogeneous setting. Nevertheless, those pre-processing techniques cannot be applied with the introduced privacy-preserving mechanisms. We propose a multi-stage method encompassing a careful co-design of verifiable secret sharing, secure aggregation, and a tailored symmetric private information retrieval scheme to achieve information-theoretic privacy guarantees and Byzantine resilience under data heterogeneity. We evaluate the effectiveness of our scheme on a variety of attacks and show how it outperforms the previously known techniques. Since the communication overhead of secure aggregation is non-negligible, we investigate the interplay with zero-order estimation methods that reduce the communication cost in state-of-the-art FL tasks and thereby make private aggregation scalable.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2506.09870,
  title  = {Private Aggregation for Byzantine-Resilient Heterogeneous Federated Learning},
  author = {Maximilian Egger and Rawad Bitar},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.09870},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T03:11:33.215Z