Adaptive Gradient Clipping for Robust Federated Learning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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-aggregation gradient clipping. However, existing static clipping strategies yield inconsistent results: enhancing robustness against some attacks while being ineffective or even detrimental against others. To address this limitation, we propose a principled adaptive clipping strategy, Adaptive Robust Clipping (ARC), which dynamically adjusts clipping thresholds based on the input gradients. We prove that ARC not only preserves the theoretical robustness guarantees of SOTA Robust-DGD methods but also provably improves asymptotic convergence when the model is well-initialized. Extensive experiments on benchmark image classification tasks confirm these theoretical insights, demonstrating that ARC significantly enhances robustness, particularly in highly heterogeneous and adversarial settings.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.018 | 0.004 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".