Communication Compression for Byzantine Robust Learning: New Efficient Algorithms and Improved Rates

Byzantine robustness is an essential feature of algorithms for certain distributed optimization problems, typically encountered in collaborative/federated learning. These problems are usually huge-scale, implying that communication compression is also imperative for their resolution. These factors have spurred recent algorithmic and theoretical developments in the literature of Byzantine-robust learning with compression. In this paper, we contribute to this research area in two main directions. First, we propose a new Byzantine-robust method with compression – Byz-DASHA-PAGE – and prove that the new method has better convergence rate (for non-convex and Polyak-Łojasiewicz smooth optimization problems), smaller neighborhood size in the heterogeneous case, and tolerates more Byzantine workers under over-parametrization than the previous method with SOTA theoretical convergence guarantees (Byz-VR-MARINA). Secondly, we develop the first Byzantine-robust method with communication compression and error feedback – Byz-EF21 – along with its bidirectional compression version – ByzEF21-BC – and derive the convergence rates for these methods for non-convex and Polyak-Łojasiewicz smooth case. We test the proposed methods and illustrate our theoretical findings in the numerical experiments.