Byzantine Fault Tolerance in Distributed Machine Learning : a Survey

Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) is one of the most challenging problems in Distributed Machine Learning (DML), defined as the resilience of a fault-tolerant system in the presence of malicious components. Byzantine failures are still difficult to deal with due to their unrestricted nature, which results in the possibility of generating arbitrary data. Significant research efforts are constantly being made to implement BFT in DML. Some recent studies have considered various BFT approaches in DML. However, some aspects are limited, such as the few approaches analyzed, and there is no classification of the techniques used in the studied approaches. In this paper, we present a survey of recent work surrounding BFT in DML, mainly in first-order optimization methods, especially Stochastic Gradient Descent(SGD). We highlight key techniques as well as fundamental approaches. We provide an illustrative description of the techniques used in BFT in DML, with a proposed classification of BFT approaches in the context of their fundamental techniques. This classification is established on specific criteria such as communication process, optimization method, and topology setting, which characterize future work methods addressing open challenge