FedStrategist: A Meta-Learning Framework for Adaptive and Robust Aggregation in Federated Learning

TL;DR

FedStrategist introduces a meta-learning framework that dynamically selects optimal aggregation rules in federated learning, enhancing robustness against adaptive attacks and heterogeneous data environments.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel meta-learning approach using a contextual bandit to adaptively choose aggregation defenses in federated learning, outperforming static methods.

Findings

Adaptive agent learns superior aggregation policies across scenarios.

The agent effectively counters sophisticated adversaries.

A controllable policy balances performance and security.

Abstract

Federated Learning (FL) offers a paradigm for privacy-preserving collaborative AI, but its decentralized nature creates significant vulnerabilities to model poisoning attacks. While numerous static defenses exist, their effectiveness is highly context-dependent, often failing against adaptive adversaries or in heterogeneous data environments. This paper introduces FedStrategist, a novel meta-learning framework that reframes robust aggregation as a real-time, cost-aware control problem. We design a lightweight contextual bandit agent that dynamically selects the optimal aggregation rule from an arsenal of defenses based on real-time diagnostic metrics. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate that no single static rule is universally optimal. We show that our adaptive agent successfully learns superior policies across diverse scenarios, including a ``Krum-favorable" environment and against a sophisticated "stealth" adversary designed to neutralize specific diagnostic signals. Critically, we analyze the paradoxical scenario where a non-robust baseline achieves high but compromised accuracy, and demonstrate that our agent learns a conservative policy to prioritize model integrity. Furthermore, we prove the agent's policy is controllable via a single "risk tolerance" parameter, allowing practitioners to explicitly manage the trade-off between performance and security. Our work provides a new, practical, and analyzable approach to creating resilient and intelligent decentralized AI systems.