Federated Learning in the Presence of Adversarial Client Unavailability

Abstract: Federated learning is a decentralized machine learning framework that enables collaborative model training without revealing raw data. Due to the diverse hardware and software limitations, a client may not always be available for the computation requests from the parameter server. An emerging line of research is devoted to tackling arbitrary client unavailability. However, existing work still imposes structural assumptions on the unavailability patterns, impeding their applicability in challenging scenarios wherein the unavailability patterns are beyond the control of the parameter server. Moreover, in harsh environments like battlefields, adversaries can selectively and adaptively silence specific clients. In this paper, we relax the structural assumptions and consider adversarial client unavailability. To quantify the degrees of client unavailability, we use the notion of $\epsilon$-adversary dropout fraction. We show that simple variants of FedAvg or FedProx, albeit completely agnostic to $\epsilon$, converge to an estimation error on the order of $\epsilon (G^2 + \sigma^2)$ for non-convex global objectives and $\epsilon(G^2 + \sigma^2)/\mu^2$ for $\mu$ strongly convex global objectives, where $G$ is a heterogeneity parameter and $\sigma^2$ is the noise level. Conversely, we prove that any algorithm has to suffer an estimation error of at least $\epsilon (G^2 + \sigma^2)/8$ and $\epsilon(G^2 + \sigma^2)/(8\mu^2)$ for non-convex global objectives and $\mu$-strongly convex global objectives. Furthermore, the convergence speeds of the FedAvg or FedProx variants are $O(1/\sqrt{T})$ for non-convex objectives and $O(1/T)$ for strongly-convex objectives, both of which are the best possible for any first-order method that only has access to noisy gradients.