# Robust Quantity-Aware Aggregation for Federated Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.10848 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10848/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 May 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.05629/) (2016)
- [Federated Optimization in Heterogeneous Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.06127/) (2018)
- [Adaptive Federated Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00295/) (2020)
- [An overview of gradient descent optimization algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04747/) (2016)
- [How To Backdoor Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.00459/) (2018)
- [Byzantine-Robust Distributed Learning: Towards Optimal Statistical Rates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01498/) (2018)
- [Federated Multi-Task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.10467/) (2017)
- [The Future of Digital Health with Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08119/) (2020)
- [Federated Learning for Mobile Keyboard Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.03604/) (2018)
- [Local Model Poisoning Attacks to Byzantine-Robust Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11815/) (2019)
- [Analyzing Federated Learning through an Adversarial Lens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12470/) (2018)
- [The Hidden Vulnerability of Distributed Learning in Byzantium](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.07927/) (2018)
- [Robust Aggregation for Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.13445/) (2019)
- [Attack of the Tails: Yes, You Really Can Backdoor Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.05084/) (2020)
- [A Little Is Enough: Circumventing Defenses For Distributed Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.06156/) (2019)
- [Can You Really Backdoor Federated Learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07963/) (2019)
- [Applied Federated Learning: Improving Google Keyboard Query Suggestions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02903/) (2018)
- [Federated Learning for Smart Healthcare: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.08834/) (2021)
- [Federated Learning for Emoji Prediction in a Mobile Keyboard](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04329/) (2019)
- [Range Loss for Deep Face Recognition with Long-tail](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08976/) (2016)
- [Retrieval Augmented Classification for Long-Tail Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11233/) (2022)
- [CRFL: Certifiably Robust Federated Learning against Backdoor Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08283/) (2021)
- [Federated Learning Of Out-Of-Vocabulary Words](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.10635/) (2019)
- [ESAM: Discriminative Domain Adaptation with Non-Displayed Items to Improve Long-Tail Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10545/) (2020)
- [Efficient-FedRec: Efficient Federated Learning Framework for Privacy-Preserving News Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05446/) (2021)
- [Towards Federated Learning With Byzantine-Robust Client Weighting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04986/) (2020)
- [Uni-FedRec: A Unified Privacy-Preserving News Recommendation Framework for Model Training and Online Serving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05236/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Certifiably Byzantine-Robust Federated Conformal Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01960/) (2024)
- [Robust Server Defense Against Unreliable Clients in One-Shot Fair Collaborative Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.08616/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Federated learning (FL) enables multiple clients to collaboratively train models without sharing their local data, and becomes an important privacy-preserving machine learning framework. However, classical FL faces serious security and robustness problem, e.g., malicious clients can poison model updates and at the same time claim large quantities to amplify the impact of their model updates in the model aggregation. Existing defense methods for FL, while all handling malicious model updates, either treat all quantities benign or simply ignore/truncate the quantities of all clients. The former is vulnerable to quantity-enhanced attack, while the latter leads to sub-optimal performance since the local data on different clients is usually in significantly different sizes. In this paper, we propose a robust quantity-aware aggregation algorithm for federated learning, called FedRA, to perform the aggregation with awareness of local data quantities while being able to defend against quantity-enhanced attacks. More specifically, we propose a method to filter malicious clients by jointly considering the uploaded model updates and data quantities from different clients, and performing quantity-aware weighted averaging on model updates from remaining clients. Moreover, as the number of malicious clients participating in the federated learning may dynamically change in different rounds, we also propose a malicious client number estimator to predict how many suspicious clients should be filtered in each round. Experiments on four public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our FedRA method in defending FL against quantity-enhanced attacks.