defense arXiv Apr 30, 2026 · 21d ago
Zehui Tang, Yuchen Liu, Feihu Huang · Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics · MIIT Key Laboratory of Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
Adaptive aggregation defense for federated learning that dynamically adjusts weights across multiple defense layers to counter Byzantine poisoning attacks
Data Poisoning Attack federated-learning
Federated learning (FL) is a popular distributed learning paradigm in machine learning, which enables multiple clients to collaboratively train models under the guidance of a server without exposing private client data. However, FL's decentralized nature makes it vulnerable to poisoning attacks, where malicious clients can submit corrupted models to manipulate the system. To counter such attacks, although various Byzantine-robust methods have been proposed, these methods struggle to provide balanced defense against multiple types of attacks or rely on possessing the dataset in the server. To deal with these drawbacks, thus, we propose an effective multi-layer defensive adaptive aggregation for Bzantine-robust federated learning (AdaBFL) based on a novel three-layer defensive mechanism, which can adaptively adjust the weights of defense algorithms to counter complex attacks. Moreover, we provide convergence properties of our AdaBFL method under the non-convex setting on non-iid data. Comprehensive experiments across multiple datasets validate the superiority of our AdaBFL over the comparable algorithms.
federated Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics · MIIT Key Laboratory of Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence