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arXiv · 2603.12512

Byzantine-Robust Optimization under $(L_0, L_1)$-Smoothness

Arman Bolatov·Samuel Horváth·Martin Takáč·Eduard Gorbunov
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Abstract

We consider distributed optimization under Byzantine attacks in the presence of $(L_0,L_1)$-smoothness, a generalization of standard $L$-smoothness that captures functions with state-dependent gradient Lipschitz constants. We propose Byz-NSGDM, a normalized stochastic gradient descent method with momentum that achieves robustness against Byzantine workers while maintaining convergence guarantees. Our algorithm combines momentum normalization with Byzantine-robust aggregation enhanced by Nearest Neighbor Mixing (NNM) to handle both the challenges posed by $(L_0,L_1)$-smoothness and Byzantine adversaries. We prove that Byz-NSGDM achieves a convergence rate of $O(K^{-1/4})$ up to a Byzantine bias floor proportional to the robustness coefficient and gradient heterogeneity. Experimental validation on heterogeneous MNIST classification, synthetic $(L_0,L_1)$-smooth optimization, and character-level language modeling with a small GPT model demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach against various Byzantine attack strategies. An ablation study further shows that Byz-NSGDM is robust across a wide range of momentum and learning rate choices.

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Arman Bolatov, Samuel Horváth, Martin Takáč, Eduard Gorbunov. 2026-03-12. Byzantine-Robust Optimization under $(L_0, L_1)$-Smoothness. https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12512

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