Malicious Clients and Contribution Co-Aware Federated Unlearning

Abstract

Existing federated unlearning methods to eliminate the negative impact of malicious clients on the global model are influenced by unreasonable assumptions (e.g., an auxiliary dataset) or fail to balance model performance and efficiency. To overcome these shortcomings, we propose a malicious clients and contribution co-aware federated unlearning (MCC-Fed) method. Specifically, we introduce a method for detecting malicious clients to reduce their impact on the global model. Next, we design a contribution-aware metric, which accurately quantifies the negative impact of malicious clients on the global calculating their historical contribution ratio. Then, based on this metric, we propose a novel federated unlearning method in which benign clients use the contribution-aware metric as a regularization term to unlearn the influence of malicious clients, and restoring model performance. Experimental results demonstrate that our method effectively addresses the issue of excessive unlearning during the unlearning process, improves the efficiency of performance recovery, and enhances robustness against malicious clients. Federated unlearning effectively removes malicious clients’ influence while reducing training costs compared to retraining.