A Multi-Granularity Clustering Approach for Federated Backdoor Defense with the Adam Optimizer

A Multi-Granularity Clustering Approach for Federated Backdoor Defense with the Adam Optimizer

Jidong Yuan, Qihang Zhang, Naiyue Chen, Shengbo Chen, Baomin Xu

Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 6931-6939. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2025/771

Federated learning is vulnerable to backdoor attacks due to its distributed nature and the inability to access local datasets. Meanwhile, the heterogeneity of distributed data further complicates the detection of such attacks. However, existing defense strategies often overlook the presence of non-stationary objectives and noisy gradients across multiple clients, making it challenging to accurately and efficiently identify malicious participants. To address these challenges, we propose a backdoor defense method for Federated Learning with Adam optimizer and multi-granularity Clustering (FLAC), incorporating both coarse-grained and fine-grained clustering mechanisms to neutralize backdoor attacks. First, the Adam optimizer accelerates the learning process by mitigating the impact of noisy gradients and addressing the non-stationary objectives posed by different clients under attack. Second, a multi-granularity clustering process is considered to differentiate between benign clients and potential attackers. This is followed by an adaptive clipping strategy to further alleviate the influence of malicious attackers. Our theoretical analysis demonstrates the consistent convergence of Adam in a federated backdoor defense environment. Extensive experimental results validate the effectiveness of our defense approach.
Keywords:
Machine Learning: ML: Federated learning
Computer Vision: CV: Adversarial learning, adversarial attack and defense methods
Machine Learning: ML: Clustering
Multidisciplinary Topics and Applications: MTA: Security and privacy