Robust distributed gradient aggregation using projections onto gradient manifolds

Abstract

We study the distributed gradient aggregation problem where individual clients contribute to learning a central model by sharing parameter gradients constructed from local losses. However, errors in some gradients, caused by low-quality data or adversaries, can degrade the learning process when naively combined. Existing robust gradient aggregation approaches assume that local data represent the global data-generating distribution, which may not always apply to heterogeneous (non-i.i.d.) client data. We propose a new algorithm that can robustly aggregate gradients from potentially heterogeneous clients. Our approach leverages the manifold structure inherent in heterogeneous client gradients and evaluates gradient anomaly degrees by projecting them onto this manifold. This algorithm is implemented as a simple and efficient method that accumulates random projections within the subspace defined by the nearest neighbors within a gradient cloud. Our experiments demonstrate consistent performance improvements over state-of-the-art robust aggregation algorithms.