Mitigating Sybils in Federated Learning Poisoning
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Machine learning (ML) over distributed multi-party data is required for a variety of domains. Existing approaches, such as federated learning, collect the outputs computed by a group of devices at a central aggregator and run iterative algorithms to train a globally shared model. Unfortunately, such approaches are susceptible to a variety of attacks, including model poisoning, which is made substantially worse in the presence of sybils. In this paper we first evaluate the vulnerability of federated learning to sybil-based poisoning attacks. We then describe \emph{FoolsGold}, a novel defense to this problem that identifies poisoning sybils based on the diversity of client updates in the distributed learning process. Unlike prior work, our system does not bound the expected number of attackers, requires no auxiliary information outside of the learning process, and makes fewer assumptions about clients and their data. In our evaluation we show that FoolsGold exceeds the capabilities of existing state of the art approaches to countering sybil-based label-flipping and backdoor poisoning attacks. Our results hold for different distributions of client data, varying poisoning targets, and various sybil strategies. Code can be found at: https://github.com/DistributedML/FoolsGold
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.024 | 0.159 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it