Publications related to Byzantine Fault-Tolerance in Federated Local SGD Under 2f-Redundancy

Optimization Algorithms for Decentralized, Distributed and Collaborative Machine Learning

Distributed learning is the key for enabling training of modern large-scale machine learning models, through parallelising the learning process. Collaborative learning is essential for learning from privacy-sensitive data that is distributed across various ...

EPFL2024

Stochastic pairwise preference convergence in Bayesian agents

Max-Olivier Hongler

Beliefs inform the behaviour of forward-thinking agents in complex environments. Recently, sequential Bayesian inference has emerged as a mechanism to study belief formation among agents adapting to dynamical conditions. However, we lack critical theory to ...

2024

Understanding generalization and robustness in modern deep learning

Maksym Andriushchenko

In this thesis, we study two closely related directions: robustness and generalization in modern deep learning. Deep learning models based on empirical risk minimization are known to be often non-robust to small, worst-case perturbations known as adversari ...

EPFL2024

Planetary-Scale Byzantine Fault Tolerance

Matteo Monti

The scale and pervasiveness of the Internet make it a pillar of planetary communication, industry and economy, as well as a fundamental medium for public discourse and democratic engagement. In stark contrast with the Internet's decentralized infrastructur ...

EPFL2024

On the Generalization of Stochastic Gradient Descent with Momentum

Volkan Cevher, Kimon Antonakopoulos

While momentum-based accelerated variants of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) are widely used when training machine learning models, there is little theoretical understanding on the generalization error of such methods. In this work, we first show that th ...

Microtome Publishing2024

Revisiting Character-level Adversarial Attacks for Language Models

Volkan Cevher, Grigorios Chrysos, Fanghui Liu, Yongtao Wu, Elias Abad Rocamora

Adversarial attacks in Natural Language Processing apply perturbations in the character or token levels. Token-level attacks, gaining prominence for their use of gradient-based methods, are susceptible to altering sentence semantics, leading to invalid adv ...

2024

Social Opinion Formation and Decision Making Under Communication Trends

Ali H. Sayed, Virginia Bordignon, Mert Kayaalp

This work studies the learning process over social networks under partial and random information sharing. In traditional social learning models, agents exchange full belief information with each other while trying to infer the true state of nature. We stud ...

Ieee-Inst Electrical Electronics Engineers Inc2024

Topics in statistical physics of high-dimensional machine learning

Hugo Chao Cui

In the past few years, Machine Learning (ML) techniques have ushered in a paradigm shift, allowing the harnessing of ever more abundant sources of data to automate complex tasks. The technical workhorse behind these important breakthroughs arguably lies in ...

EPFL2024

Towards practical reinforcement learning for tokamak magnetic control

Jonas Buchli, Federico Alberto Alfredo Felici, Cristian Galperti, Brendan Tracey

Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promising results for real-time control systems, including the domain of plasma magnetic control. However, there are still significant drawbacks compared to traditional feedback control approaches for magnetic confinem ...

Elsevier Science Sa2024

Deep Learning Theory Through the Lens of Diagonal Linear Networks

Scott William Pesme

In this PhD manuscript, we explore optimisation phenomena which occur in complex neural networks through the lens of

2

-layer diagonal linear networks. This rudimentary architecture, which consists of a two layer feedforward linear network with a diagonal ...

EPFL2024

Impact of Redundancy on Resilience in Distributed Optimization and Learning

Shuo Liu, Nirupam Gupta

This paper considers the problem of resilient distributed optimization and stochastic learning in a server-based architecture. The system comprises a server and multiple agents, where each agent has its own local cost function. The agents collaborate with ...

Assoc Computing Machinery2023

Multi-agent Learning with Privacy Guarantees

Elsa Rizk

A multi-agent system consists of a collection of decision-making or learning agents subjected to streaming observations from some real-world phenomenon. The goal of the system is to solve some global learning or optimization problem in a distributed or dec ...

EPFL2023

Byzantine Machine Learning: A Primer

Rachid Guerraoui, Nirupam Gupta, Rafaël Benjamin Pinot

The problem of Byzantine resilience in distributed machine learning, a.k.a., Byzantine machine learning, consists in designing distributed algorithms that can train an accurate model despite the presence of Byzantine nodes, i.e., nodes with corrupt data or ...

2023

Phenomenological theory of variational quantum ground-state preparation

Ivano Tavernelli, Giuseppe Carleo

The variational approach is a cornerstone of computational physics, considering both conventional and quantum computing computational platforms. The variational quantum eigensolver algorithm aims to prepare the ground state of a Hamiltonian exploiting para ...

Amer Physical Soc2023

Communication-efficient distributed training of machine learning models

Thijs Vogels

In this thesis, we explore techniques for addressing the communication bottleneck in data-parallel distributed training of deep learning models. We investigate algorithms that either reduce the size of the messages that are exchanged between workers, or th ...

EPFL2023

Networked Signal and Information Processing: Learning by multiagent systems

Ali H. Sayed, Stefan Vlaski

This article reviews significant advances in networked signal and information processing (SIP), which have enabled in the last 25 years extending decision making and inference, optimization, control, and learning to the increasingly ubiquitous environments ...

IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC2023

Alternation makes the adversary weaker in two-player games

Volkan Cevher, Ali Kavis, Luca Viano, Efstratios Panteleimon Skoulakis

Motivated by alternating game-play in two-player games, we study an altenating variant of the Online Linear Optimization (OLO). In alternating OLO, a learner at each round t ∈[n] selects a vector xt and then an adversary selects a cost-vector ct ∈[−1,1]n. ...

2023

Multi-agent actor-critic with time dynamical opponent model

Qin Wang, Olga Fink

In multi-agent reinforcement learning, multiple agents learn simultaneously while interacting with a common environment and each other. Since the agents adapt their policies during learning, not only the behavior of a single agent becomes non-stationary, b ...

2023

Probabilistic methods for neural combinatorial optimization

Nikolaos Karalias

The monumental progress in the development of machine learning models has led to a plethora of applications with transformative effects in engineering and science. This has also turned the attention of the research community towards the pursuit of construc ...

EPFL2023

Byzantine-Resilient Learning Beyond Gradients: Distributing Evolutionary Search

Rachid Guerraoui, Andrei Kucharavy, Matteo Monti

Modern machine learning (ML) models are capable of impressive performances. However, their prowess is not due only to the improvements in their architecture and training algorithms but also to a drastic increase in computational power used to train them.|S ...

Assoc Computing Machinery2023