Optimizing Server-side Aggregation For Robust Federated Learning via Subspace Training

Non-IID data distribution across clients and poisoning attacks are two main challenges in real-world federated learning systems. While both of them have attracted great research interest with specific strategies developed, no known solution manages to address them in a unified framework. To jointly overcome both challenges, we propose SmartFL, a generic approach that optimizes the server-side aggregation process with a small clean server-collected proxy dataset (e.g., around one hundred samples, 0.2% of the dataset) via a subspace training technique. Specifically, the aggregation weight of each participating client at each round is optimized using the server-collected proxy data, which is essentially the optimization of the global model in the convex hull spanned by client models. Since at each round, the number of tunable parameters optimized on the server side equals the number of participating clients (thus independent of the model size), we are able to train a global model with massive parameters using only a small amount of proxy data. We provide theoretical analyses of the convergence and generalization capacity for SmartFL. Empirically, SmartFL achieves state-of-the-art performance on both federated learning with non-IID data distribution and federated learning with malicious clients. The source code will be released.