Interactive Byzantine-Resilient Gradient Coding for General Data Assignments

We tackle the problem of Byzantine errors in distributed gradient descent within the Byzantine-resilient gradient coding framework. Our proposed solution can recover the exact full gradient in the presence of s malicious workers with a data replication factor of only s+1. It generalizes previous solutions to any data assignment scheme that has a regular replication over all data samples. The scheme detects malicious workers through additional interactive communication and a small number of local computations at the main node, leveraging group-wise comparisons between workers with a provably optimal grouping strategy. The scheme requires at most s interactive rounds that incur a total communication cost logarithmic in the number of data samples.