Reinforcement Learning as a Catalyst for Robust and Fair Federated Learning: Deciphering the Dynamics of Client Contributions

Recent advancements in federated learning (FL) have produced models that retain user privacy by training across multiple decentralized devices or systems holding local data samples. However, these strategies often neglect the inherent challenges of statistical heterogeneity and vulnerability to adversarial attacks, which can degrade model robustness and fairness. Personalized FL strategies offer some respite by adjusting models to fit individual client profiles, yet they tend to neglect server-side aggregation vulnerabilities. To address these issues, we propose Reinforcement Federated Learning (RFL), a novel framework that leverages deep reinforcement learning to adaptively optimize client contribution during aggregation, thereby enhancing both model robustness against malicious clients and fairness across participants under non-identically distributed settings. To achieve this goal, we propose a meticulous approach involving a Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient-based algorithm for continuous control of aggregation weights, an innovative client selection method based on model parameter distances, and a reward mechanism guided by validation set performance. Empirically, extensive experiments demonstrate that, in terms of robustness, RFL outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, while maintaining comparable levels of fairness, offering a promising solution to build resilient and fair federated systems.