Robust Aggregation for Federated Learning

We present a robust aggregation approach to make federated learning robust to settings when a fraction of the devices may be sending corrupted updates to the server. The proposed approach relies on a robust secure aggregation oracle based on the geometric median, which returns a robust aggregate using a constant number of calls to a regular non-robust secure average oracle. The robust aggregation oracle is privacy-preserving, similar to the secure average oracle it builds upon. We provide experimental results of the proposed approach with linear models and deep networks for two tasks in computer vision and natural language processing. The robust aggregation approach is agnostic to the level of corruption; it outperforms the classical aggregation approach in terms of robustness when the level of corruption is high, while being competitive in the regime of low corruption.