Federated Behavioural Planes: Explaining the Evolution of Client Behaviour in Federated Learning

Abstract

Federated Learning (FL), a privacy-aware approach in distributed deep learning environments, enables many clients to collaboratively train a model without sharing sensitive data, thereby reducing privacy risks. However, enabling human trust and control over FL systems requires understanding the evolving behaviour of clients, whether beneficial or detrimental for the training, which still represents a key challenge in the current literature. To address this challenge, we introduce Federated Behavioural Planes (FBPs), a novel method to analyse, visualise, and explain the dynamics of FL systems, showing how clients behave under two different lenses: predictive performance (error behavioural space) and decision-making processes (counterfactual behavioural space). Our experiments demonstrate that FBPs provide informative trajectories describing the evolving states of clients and their contributions to the global model, thereby enabling the identification of clusters of clients with similar behaviours. Leveraging the patterns identified by FBPs, we propose a robust aggregation technique named Federated Behavioural Shields to detect malicious or noisy client models, thereby enhancing security and surpassing the efficacy of existing state-of-the-art FL defense mechanisms. Our code is publicly available on GitHub.