ROAST: Risk-aware Outlier-exposure for Adversarial Selective Training of Anomaly Detectors Against Evasion Attacks
Mohammed Elnawawy, Gargi Mitra, Shahrear Iqbal et al. · University of British Columbia · National Research Council Canada
Mohammed Elnawawy, Gargi Mitra, Shahrear Iqbal et al. · University of British Columbia · National Research Council Canada
Selective training framework that improves anomaly detector recall against evasion attacks by focusing on less vulnerable patient data
Safety-critical domains like healthcare rely on deep neural networks (DNNs) for prediction, yet DNNs remain vulnerable to evasion attacks. Anomaly detectors (ADs) are widely used to protect DNNs, but conventional ADs are trained indiscriminately on benign data from all patients, overlooking physiological differences that introduce noise, degrade robustness, and reduce recall. In this paper, we propose ROAST, a novel risk-aware outlier exposure selective training framework that improves AD recall without sacrificing precision. ROAST identifies patients who are less vulnerable to attack and focuses training on these cleaner, more reliable data, thereby reducing false negatives and improving recall. To preserve precision, the framework applies outlier exposure by injecting adversarial samples into the training set of the less vulnerable patients, avoiding noisy data from others. Experiments show that ROAST increases recall by 16.2\% while reducing the training time by 88.3\% on average compared to indiscriminate training, with minimal impact on precision.
Guojun Tang, Jiayu Zhou, Mohammad Mamun et al. · University of Calgary · University of Michigan +1 more
Defends federated learning against adversarial clients using influence-score aggregation, 450x faster than Shapley-value baselines
Federated learning (FL) faces persistent robustness challenges due to non-IID data distributions and adversarial client behavior. A promising mitigation strategy is contribution evaluation, which enables adaptive aggregation by quantifying each client's utility to the global model. However, state-of-the-art Shapley-value-based approaches incur high computational overhead due to repeated model reweighting and inference, which limits their scalability. We propose FedIF, a novel FL aggregation framework that leverages trajectory-based influence estimation to efficiently compute client contributions. FedIF adapts decentralized FL by introducing normalized and smoothed influence scores computed from lightweight gradient operations on client updates and a public validation set. Theoretical analysis demonstrates that FedIF yields a tighter bound on one-step global loss change under noisy conditions. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10 and Fashion-MNIST show that FedIF achieves robustness comparable to or exceeding SV-based methods in the presence of label noise, gradient noise, and adversarial samples, while reducing aggregation overhead by up to 450x. Ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of FedIF's design choices, including local weight normalization and influence smoothing. Our results establish FedIF as a practical, theoretically grounded, and scalable alternative to Shapley-value-based approaches for efficient and robust FL in real-world deployments.