27 accepted papers
Federated inference, in the form of one-shot federated learning, edge ensembles, or federated ensembles, has emerged as an attractive solution to combine predictions from multiple models. This paradigm enables each model to remain local and proprietary while a central server queries them and aggrega…
Machine learning systems increasingly face requirements to remove entire domains of information—such as toxic language or biases—rather than individual user data. This task presents a dilemma: full removal of the unwanted domain data is computationally expensive, while random partial removal is stat…
Robust federated learning aims to maintain reliable performance despite the presence of adversarial or misbehaving workers. While state-of-the-art (SOTA) robust distributed gradient descent (Robust-DGD) methods were proven theoretically optimal, their empirical success has often relied on pre-aggreg…
We address the problem of machine unlearning, where the goal is to remove the influence of specific training data from a model upon request, motivated by privacy concerns and regulatory requirements such as the “right to be forgotten.” Unfortunately, existing methods rely on restrictive assumptions…
Machine unlearning, the process of selectively removing data from trained models, is increasingly crucial for addressing privacy concerns and knowledge gaps post-deployment. Despite this importance, existing approaches are often heuristic and lack formal guarantees. In this paper, we analyze the fun…
Resilience against malicious participants and data privacy are essential for trustworthy federated learning, yet achieving both with good utility typically requires the strong assumption of a trusted central server. This paper shows that a significantly weaker assumption suffices: each pair of parti…
The possibility of adversarial (a.k.a., Byzantine) clients makes federated learning (FL) prone to arbitrary manipulation. The natural approach to robustify FL against adversarial clients is to replace the simple averaging operation at the server in the standard $\mathsf{FedAvg}$ algorithm by a robus…
Federated learning (FL) is an appealing paradigm that allows a group of machines (a.k.a. clients) to learn collectively while keeping their data local. However, due to the heterogeneity between the clients’ data distributions, the model obtained through the use of FL algorithms may perform poorly on…
Federated Learning (FL) is an appealing approach to training machine learning models without sharing raw data. However, standard FL algorithms are iterative and thus induce a significant communication cost. One-Shot FL (OFL) trades the iterative exchange of models between clients and the server wit…
Many applications, such as content moderation and recommendation, require reviewing and scoring a large number of alternatives. Doing so robustly is however very challenging. Indeed, voters’ inputs are inevitably sparse: most alternatives are only scored by a small fraction of voters. This sparsity…
Decentralized learning is appealing as it enables the scalable usage of large amounts of distributed data and resources without resorting to any central entity, while promoting privacy since every user minimizes the direct exposure of their data. Yet, without additional precautions, curious users ca…
We present Epidemic Learning (EL), a simple yet powerful decentralized learning (DL) algorithm that leverages changing communication topologies to achieve faster model convergence compared to conventional DL approaches. At each round of EL, each node sends its model updates to a random sample of $s$…
Byzantine machine learning (ML) aims to ensure the resilience of distributed learning algorithms to misbehaving (or Byzantine) machines. Although this problem received significant attention, prior works often assume the data held by the machines to be homogeneous, which is seldom true in practical s…
The ubiquity of distributed machine learning (ML) in sensitive public domain applications calls for algorithms that protect data privacy, while being robust to faults and adversarial behaviors. Although privacy and robustness have been extensively studied independently in distributed ML, their synth…
The geometric median, an instrumental component of the secure machine learning toolbox, is known to be effective when robustly aggregating models (or gradients), gathered from potentially malicious (or strategic) users. What is less known is the extent to which the geometric median incentivizes dish…
Collaborative learning algorithms, such as distributed SGD (or D-SGD), are prone to faulty machines that may deviate from their prescribed algorithm because of software or hardware bugs, poisoned data or malicious behaviors. While many solutions have been proposed to enhance the robustness of D-SGD…
The theory underlying robust distributed learning algorithms, designed to resist adversarial machines, matches empirical observations when data is homogeneous. Under data heterogeneity however, which is the norm in practical scenarios, established lower bounds on the learning error are essentially v…
To study the resilience of distributed learning, the “Byzantine" literature considers a strong threat model where workers can report arbitrary gradients to the parameter server. Whereas this model helped obtain several fundamental results, it has sometimes been considered unrealistic, when the worke…
Byzantine resilience emerged as a prominent topic within the distributed machine learning community. Essentially, the goal is to enhance distributed optimization algorithms, such as distributed SGD, in a way that guarantees convergence despite the presence of some misbehaving (a.k.a.,
We study \emph{Byzantine collaborative learning}, where $n$ nodes seek to collectively learn from each others' local data. The data distribution may vary from one node to another. No node is trusted, and $f < n$ nodes can behave arbitrarily. We prove that collaborative learning is equivalent to a ne…
In this paper we tackle the challenge of making the stochastic coordinate descent algorithm differentially private. Compared to the classical gradient descent algorithm where updates operate on a single model vector and controlled noise addition to this vector suffices to hide critical information…
Byzantine-resilient Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) aims at shielding model training from Byzantine faults, be they ill-labeled training datapoints, exploited software/hardware vulnerabilities, or malicious worker nodes in a distributed setting. Two recent attacks have been challenging state-of-th…
Asynchronous distributed machine learning solutions have proven very effective so far, but always assuming perfectly functioning workers. In practice, some of the workers can however exhibit Byzantine behavior, caused by hardware failures, software bugs, corrupt data, or even malicious attacks. We i…
The rise of connected personal devices together with privacy concerns call for machine learning algorithms capable of leveraging the data of a large number of agents to learn personalized models under strong privacy requirements. In this paper, we introduce an efficient algorithm to address the abov…
While machine learning is going through an era of celebrated success, concerns have been raised about the vulnerability of its backbone: stochastic gradient descent (SGD). Recent approaches have been proposed to ensure the robustness of distributed SGD against adversarial (Byzantine) workers sending
In reinforcement learning, agents learn by performing actions and observing their outcomes. Sometimes, it is desirable for a human operator to interrupt an agent in order to prevent dangerous situations from happening. Yet, as part of their learning process, agents may link these interruptions, that…
We study the resilience to Byzantine failures of distributed implementations of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD). So far, distributed machine learning frameworks have largely ignored the possibility of failures, especially arbitrary (i.e., Byzantine) ones. Causes of failures include software bugs…