We consider the problem of distributed statistical machine learning in adversarial settings, where some unknown and time-varying subset of working machines may be compromised and behave arbitrarily to prevent an accurate model from being learned. This setting captures the potential adversarial attacks faced by Federated Learning -- a modern machine learning paradigm that is proposed by Google researchers and has been intensively studied for ensuring user privacy. Formally, we focus on a distributed system consisting of a parameter server and @math working machines. Each working machine keeps @math data samples, where @math is the total number of samples. The goal is to collectively learn the underlying true model parameter of dimension @math . In classical batch gradient descent methods, the gradients reported to the server by the working machines are aggregated via simple averaging, which is vulnerable to a single Byzantine failure. In this paper, we propose a Byzantine gradient descent method based on the geometric median of means of the gradients. We show that our method can tolerate @math Byzantine failures, and the parameter estimate converges in @math rounds with an estimation error of @math , hence approaching the optimal error rate @math in the centralized and failure-free setting. The total computational complexity of our algorithm is of @math at each working machine and @math at the central server, and the total communication cost is of @math . We further provide an application of our general results to the linear regression problem. A key challenge arises in the above problem is that Byzantine failures create arbitrary and unspecified dependency among the iterations and the aggregated gradients. We prove that the aggregated gradient converges uniformly to the true gradient function.
Finite-sample replacement breakdown points are derived for different types of estimators of multivariate location and covariance matrices. The role of various equivariance properties is illustrated. The breakdown point is related to a measure of performance based on large deviations probabilities. Finally, we show that one-step reweighting preserves the breakdown point. We propose a framework for distributed robust statistical learning on big contaminated data . The Distributed Robust Learning (DRL) framework can reduce the computational time of traditional robust learning methods by several orders of magnitude. We analyze the robustness property of DRL, showing that DRL not only preserves the robustness of the base robust learning method, but also tolerates contaminations on a constant fraction of results from computing nodes (node failures). More precisely, even in presence of the most adversarial outlier distribution over computing nodes, DRL still achieves a breakdown point of at least @math , where @math is the break down point of corresponding centralized algorithm. This is in stark contrast with naive division-and-averaging implementation, which may reduce the breakdown point by a factor of @math when @math computing nodes are used. We then specialize the DRL framework for two concrete cases: distributed robust principal component analysis and distributed robust regression. We demonstrate the efficiency and the robustness advantages of DRL through comprehensive simulations and predicting image tags on a large-scale image set.