Resilient Distributed Classification Learning Against Label Flipping Attack: An ADMM-Based Approach

Distributed classification learning (DCL) is a promising solution to establish Internet of Things-based smart applications, especially due to its strong ability in dealing with large-scale and high-concurrency data. However, the performance of DCL may be seriously affected by the label flipping attack (LFA). Regarding the LFA-resilient learning problem, most existing works are built in more centralized settings. The work addressing the secure DCL issue makes an assumption that the label flipping rates are symmetric and available for scheme design. In this article, we remove this assumption and propose an LFA-resilient DCL scheme, named FENDER, without knowing the asymmetric flipping rates. The challenge is to guarantee both attack resilience and algorithm convergence. We carefully integrate a resilient loss and the alternating direction method of the multiplier scheme, making FENDER resilient to LFA. Further, we systematically analyze the performance of FENDER according to a metric reflecting the models obtained by all the servers at different iterations. In addition, we discuss and compare FENDER with some existing methods from the aspects of algorithm establishment and performance guarantee. Finally, extensive experiments with multiple real-world data sets are performed to validate the developed theory and evaluate the performance of the trained models.