Robust Federated Learning against Noisy Clients via Masked Optimization
Journal:
arXiv
Published Date:
Jun 2, 2025
Abstract
In recent years, federated learning (FL) has made significant advance in
privacy-sensitive applications. However, it can be hard to ensure that FL
participants provide well-annotated data for training. The corresponding
annotations from different clients often contain complex label noise at varying
levels. This label noise issue has a substantial impact on the performance of
the trained models, and clients with greater noise levels can be largely
attributed for this degradation. To this end, it is necessary to develop an
effective optimization strategy to alleviate the adverse effects of these noisy
clients.In this study, we present a two-stage optimization framework,
MaskedOptim, to address this intricate label noise problem. The first stage is
designed to facilitate the detection of noisy clients with higher label noise
rates. The second stage focuses on rectifying the labels of the noisy clients'
data through an end-to-end label correction mechanism, aiming to mitigate the
negative impacts caused by misinformation within datasets. This is achieved by
learning the potential ground-truth labels of the noisy clients' datasets via
backpropagation. To further enhance the training robustness, we apply the
geometric median based model aggregation instead of the commonly-used vanilla
averaged model aggregation. We implement sixteen related methods and conduct
evaluations on three image datasets and one text dataset with diverse label
noise patterns for a comprehensive comparison. Extensive experimental results
indicate that our proposed framework shows its robustness in different
scenarios. Additionally, our label correction framework effectively enhances
the data quality of the detected noisy clients' local datasets. % Our codes
will be open-sourced to facilitate related research communities. Our codes are
available via https://github.com/Sprinter1999/MaskedOptim .
