# Zeno++: Robust Fully Asynchronous SGD

## TL;DR

Zeno++ is a robust asynchronous SGD algorithm that tolerates Byzantine failures, allowing fully asynchronous updates and unbounded Byzantine workers, with proven convergence and superior experimental performance.

## Contribution

It introduces Zeno++, a novel asynchronous SGD method that handles Byzantine failures without restrictive communication assumptions, with proven convergence for non-convex problems.

## Key findings

- Zeno++ outperforms existing Byzantine-tolerant methods in experiments.
- It converges for non-convex optimization problems.
- Handles unbounded Byzantine worker failures.

## Abstract

We propose Zeno++, a new robust asynchronous Stochastic Gradient Descent~(SGD) procedure which tolerates Byzantine failures of the workers. In contrast to previous work, Zeno++ removes some unrealistic restrictions on worker-server communications, allowing for fully asynchronous updates from anonymous workers, arbitrarily stale worker updates, and the possibility of an unbounded number of Byzantine workers. The key idea is to estimate the descent of the loss value after the candidate gradient is applied, where large descent values indicate that the update results in optimization progress. We prove the convergence of Zeno++ for non-convex problems under Byzantine failures. Experimental results show that Zeno++ outperforms existing approaches.