POLAR: Policy-based Layerwise Reinforcement Learning for Stealthy Backdoor Attacks in Federated Learning

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission20187 Authors

Keywords: Federated Learning, Adversarial Attack, Reinforcement Learning

Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) enables decentralized model training across multiple clients without exposing local data, but its distributed feature makes it vulnerable to backdoor attacks. Despite early FL backdoor attacks modifying entire models, recent studies have explored the concept of backdoor-critical (BC) layers, which poison the chosen influential layers to maintain stealthiness while achieving high effectiveness. However, existing BC layers approaches rely on rule-based selection without consideration of the interrelations between layers, making them ineffective and prone to detection by advanced defenses. In this paper, we propose POLAR (POlicy-based LAyerwise Reinforcement learning), the first pipeline to creatively adopt RL to solve the BC layer selection problem in layer-wise backdoor attack. Different from other commonly used RL paradigm, POLAR is lightweight with Bernoulli sampling. POLAR dynamically learns an attack strategy, optimizing layer selection using policy gradient updates based on backdoor success rate (BSR) improvements. To ensure stealthiness, we introduce a regularization constraint that limits the number of modified layers by penalizing large attack footprints. Extensive experiments demonstrate that POLAR outperforms the latest attack methods by up to 40\% against six state-of-the-art (SOTA) defenses.

Primary Area: unsupervised, self-supervised, semi-supervised, and supervised representation learning

Submission Number: 20187