Global Convergence Guarantees for Federated Policy Gradient Methods with Adversaries

Swetha Ganesh, Jiayu Chen, Gugan Thoppe, Vaneet Aggarwal

Abstract: Federated Reinforcement Learning (FRL) allows multiple agents to collaboratively build a decision making policy without sharing raw trajectories. However, if a small fraction of these agents are adversarial, it can lead to catastrophic results. We propose a policy gradient based approach that is robust to adversarial agents which can send arbitrary values to the server. Under this setting, our results form the first global convergence guarantees with general parametrization. These results demonstrate resilience with adversaries, while achieving optimal sample complexity of order $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}\left( \frac{1}{N\epsilon^2} \left( 1+ \frac{f^2}{N}\right)\right)$, where $N$ is the total number of agents and $f < N/2$ is the number of adversarial agents.

Submission Length: Regular submission (no more than 12 pages of main content)

Changes Since Last Submission: Removed the colors, prepared the version based on the final version.

Assigned Action Editor: ~Zhiyu_Zhang1

Submission Number: 3162