Zeno: Distributed Stochastic Gradient Descent with Suspicion-based Fault-tolerance

We propose Zeno, a new robust aggregation rule, for distributed synchronous Stochastic Gradient Descent~(SGD) under a general Byzantine failure model. The key idea is to suspect the workers that are potentially malicious, and use a ranking-based preference mechanism. This allows us to generalize beyond past work--in our case, the number of malicious workers can be arbitrarily large, and we use only the weakest assumption on honest workers~(at least one honest worker). We prove the convergence of SGD under these scenarios. Empirical results show that Zeno outperforms existing approaches under various attacks.