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SWB-DM: A Calibrated Sliced-Wasserstein-Barycenter Aggregator with Delayed-Momentum Caching for Byzantine-Robust Federated Learning under Partial Participation

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Computer Science > Machine Learning

arXiv:2609.16099 (cs)
[Submitted on 14 Sep 2026]

Title:SWB-DM: A Calibrated Sliced-Wasserstein-Barycenter Aggregator with Delayed-Momentum Caching for Byzantine-Robust Federated Learning under Partial Participation

View a PDF of the paper titled SWB-DM: A Calibrated Sliced-Wasserstein-Barycenter Aggregator with Delayed-Momentum Caching for Byzantine-Robust Federated Learning under Partial Participation, by Saranraj S and 3 other authors
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Abstract:Robust aggregation methods for federated learning quietly rest on a fragile assumption: that whoever shows up in a given round is a fair sample of the full population. In practice, they rarely are. When only a handful of clients participate per round, even a modest fraction of adversaries can dominate that sample and silently invalidate the finite-sample guarantees that coordinate-wise median, Krum, Bulyan, and trimmed mean all depend on.
We introduce SWB-DM to address this directly. SWB treats each slice of a client update as a one-dimensional distribution, computes a trimmed Wasserstein barycenter across clients, and recovers coordinate identity via a medoid-based gauge-fixing step -- a heuristic we developed and do not claim it belongs to standard optimal-transport theory. DeMoA-style delayed momentum then caches updates across the full client population each round, decoupling robustness from whoever happened to be sampled. Trim ratio calibration is not cosmetic: under-trimming causes collapse at corruption levels a properly calibrated model survives.
Across 448 CIFAR-10 configurations, plus CIFAR-100, FEMNIST, and a 500-client scalability run, we find several mechanistically distinct failure modes. Even-sample coordinate-wise median degrades to a deterministic wrong answer. Krum silently violates its own n greater than 2f+2 precondition and diverges without warning. Bulyan's n greater than or equal to 4f+3 threshold produces a sharp pass/fail boundary. On attacks, IPM defeats order-statistic defenses -- including SWB -- more reliably than ALIE, confirmed through delta-space measurements against a convergence bound.
SWB-DM's cache carries a real warm-up cost, but extending all baselines to the same round budget shows its CIFAR-10 gains are disproportionately large. On CIFAR-100, FLTrust benefits more -- for reasons entirely unrelated to caching.
Comments: 7 pages, 2 figures, 5 tables
Subjects: Machine Learning (cs.LG); Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC)
Cite as: arXiv:2609.16099 [cs.LG]
  (or arXiv:2609.16099v1 [cs.LG] for this version)
  https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.16099
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

Submission history

From: Saranraj Sankar [view email]
[v1] Mon, 14 Sep 2026 16:30:18 UTC (214 KB)
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