# AdaBFL: Multi-Layer Defensive Adaptive Aggregation for Bzantine-Robust Federated Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.27434 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.27434/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.05629/) (2016)
- [Fashion-MNIST: a Novel Image Dataset for Benchmarking Machine Learning Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07747/) (2017)
- [Federated Optimization in Heterogeneous Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.06127/) (2018)
- [On the Convergence of FedAvg on Non-IID Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02189/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Local Model Poisoning Attacks to Byzantine-Robust Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11815/) (2019)
- [FLTrust: Byzantine-robust Federated Learning via Trust Bootstrapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.13995/) (2020)
- [A Little Is Enough: Circumventing Defenses For Distributed Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.06156/) (2019)
- [Data Poisoning Attacks Against Federated Learning Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08432/) (2020)
- [Towards Poisoning of Deep Learning Algorithms with Back-gradient Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.08689/) (2017)
- [Byzantine-Robust Federated Machine Learning through Adaptive Model Averaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05125/) (2019)
- [Collaborative Learning in the Jungle (Decentralized, Byzantine, Heterogeneous, Asynchronous and Nonconvex Learning)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.00742/) (2020)
- [Zeno++: Robust Fully Asynchronous SGD](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07020/) (2019)
- [Byzantine-Robust Decentralized Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10416/) (2024)
- [Federated Learning Meets Natural Language Processing: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12603/) (2021)
- [Federated Learning for Medical Applications: A Taxonomy, Current Trends, Challenges, and Future Research Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03392/) (2022)
- [AFLGuard: Byzantine-robust Asynchronous Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06325/) (2022)
- [Auto-Train-Once: Controller Network Guided Automatic Network Pruning from Scratch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14729/) (2024)
- [Do We Really Need to Design New Byzantine-robust Aggregation Rules?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.17381/) (2025)
- [Byzantine-Robust Learning on Heterogeneous Data via Gradient Splitting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.06079/) (2023)
- [AFL: A Single-Round Analytic Approach for Federated Learning with Pre-trained Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16240/) (2024)
- [The Resource Problem of Using Linear Layer Leakage Attack in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14868/) (2023)
- [dFLMoE: Decentralized Federated Learning via Mixture of Experts for Medical Data Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10412/) (2025)
- [Communication-Efficient Training Workload Balancing for Decentralized Multi-Agent Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.00839/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Federated learning (FL) is a popular distributed learning paradigm in machine learning, which enables multiple clients to collaboratively train models under the guidance of a server without exposing private client data. However, FL's decentralized nature makes it vulnerable to poisoning attacks, where malicious clients can submit corrupted models to manipulate the system. To counter such attacks, although various Byzantine-robust methods have been proposed, these methods struggle to provide balanced defense against multiple types of attacks or rely on possessing the dataset in the server. To deal with these drawbacks, thus, we propose an effective multi-layer defensive adaptive aggregation for Bzantine-robust federated learning (AdaBFL) based on a novel three-layer defensive mechanism, which can adaptively adjust the weights of defense algorithms to counter complex attacks. Moreover, we provide convergence properties of our AdaBFL method under the non-convex setting on non-iid data. Comprehensive experiments across multiple datasets validate the superiority of our AdaBFL over the comparable algorithms.