Paper 2026/2467

DPF-SGD: Byzantine-Robust Differentially Private Federated SGD with Exact Optimality Guarantees

Likang Lu, Beijing Wodong Tianjun Information Technology Co., Ltd., Beijing, 101116, China
Jiaxin Wu, Whiting School of Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, 21218, Maryland
Abstract

Federated optimization enables collaborative learning over decentralized data but is accompanied by significant privacy risks due to the exchange of model updates. While differential privacy (DP) provides formal protection, optimization accuracy is often degraded, and robustness becomes particularly limited in the presence of Byzantine agents. A Byzantine-robust, differentially private federated SGD algorithm, DPF-SGD, is proposed, in which private step sizes are integrated with a DP noise–decay schedule to regulate gradient updates. To further enhance robustness, a privacy-preserving comparative elimination (PPCE) filter is developed to suppress Byzantine contributions during aggregation while preserving privacy guarantees. Almost sure convergence to the global optimum under ϵ-differential privacy is established, despite persistent noise and adversarial behavior. Experiments on synthetic and MNIST datasets demonstrate oneto two-order-of-magnitude reductions in final optimization error relative to DP baselines.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Applications
Publication info
Preprint.
Keywords
Federated optimizationDifferentially privacyByzantine robustnessSGD algorithm
Contact author(s)
llk2813 @ 163 com
jiaxin wu @ jhu edu
History
2026-10-14: approved
2026-10-14: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2026/2467
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2026/2467,
      author = {Likang Lu and Jiaxin Wu},
      title = {{DPF}-{SGD}: Byzantine-Robust Differentially Private Federated {SGD} with Exact Optimality Guarantees},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2026/2467},
      year = {2026},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2026/2467}
}
Note: In order to protect the privacy of readers, eprint.iacr.org does not use cookies or embedded third party content.