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arXiv · 2609.26377

FairMean: Promoting Fairness in Distributed Learning under Label Poisoning Attacks

Huigan Zheng·Jiaojiao Zhang·Yongxiang Liu
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Abstract

Fairness-aware distributed learning prioritizes clients with large losses to reduce performance disparities, but label poisoning can create large losses, thereby inducing a fairness--robustness conflict. We propose FairMean to manage this conflict. FairMean weights client gradients using a bounded, nondecreasing function of local loss. The increasing weights prioritize high-loss clients to promote fairness, while the upper bound prevents excessive loss-induced amplification of poisoned-client gradients. In the absence of label poisoning, we show that minimizing the FairMean objective is more conducive to solution fairness than minimizing the standard average-loss objective. Under label poisoning, we establish an average-stationarity bound whose attack-dependent term is proportional to the square of the poisoned-client fraction. Experiments show that FairMean promotes fairness by reducing accuracy variance while improving worst-client accuracy.

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Huigan Zheng, Jiaojiao Zhang, Yongxiang Liu. 2026-09-22. FairMean: Promoting Fairness in Distributed Learning under Label Poisoning Attacks. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26377

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