Title
Byzantine-Resilient Non-Convex Stochastic Gradient Descent
Abstract
We study adversary-resilient stochastic distributed optimization, in which $m$ machines can independently compute stochastic gradients, and cooperate to jointly optimize over their local objective functions. However, an $\alpha$-fraction of the machines are $\textit{Byzantine}$, in that they may behave in arbitrary, adversarial ways. We consider a variant of this procedure in the challenging $\textit{non-convex}$ case. Our main result is a new algorithm SafeguardSGD which can provably escape saddle points and find approximate local minima of the non-convex objective. The algorithm is based on a new concentration filtering technique, and its sample and time complexity bounds match the best known theoretical bounds in the stochastic, distributed setting when no Byzantine machines are present. Our algorithm is practical: it improves upon the performance of prior methods when training deep neural networks, it is relatively lightweight, and is the first method to withstand two recently-proposed Byzantine attacks.
Year
Venue
DocType
2021
ICLR
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
0
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Zeyuan Allen Zhu168446.35
Faeze Ebrahimian200.34
Jerry Li322922.67
Dan Alistarh434142.64