A Robust Client Selection Mechanism for Federated Learning Environments

Abstract

There is a exponential growth of data usage, specially due to the proliferation of connected applications with personalized models for different applications. In this context, Federated Learning (FL) emerges as a promising solution to enable collaborative model training while preserving the privacy and autonomy of participating clients. In a typical FL scenario, clients exhibit significant heterogeneity in terms of data distribution and hardware configurations. In this way, randomly sampling clients in each training round may not fully exploit the local updates from heterogeneous clients, resulting in lower model accuracy, slower convergence rate, degraded fairness, etc. In addition, malicious users could disseminate incorrect weights, which may decrease the accuracy of aggregated models and increase the time for convergence in FL. In this article, we introduce Resilience-aware Client Selection Mechanism for non-IID data and malicious clients in FL environment, called RICA. The proposed mechanism employs data size and entropy as criteria for client selection. In addition, RICA relies Centroid-Based Kernel Alignment (CKA) to identify and exclude potentially malicious clients. Our evaluation shows an improvement of 125% in Accuracy values in a scenario of malicious clients, which means the RICA+CKA demonstrates a more stable and resilient approach, reaching 90% accuracy in a few rounds compared to the default average approach, reached only around 30%. Therefore, results of the behavior of RICA+CKA in different datasets show the evaluation of different numbers of clients reaching around 90% while the other approach does not pass the 50% Accuracy.