Dynamic Free-Rider Detection in Federated Learning via Simulated Attack Patterns

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04611v1
• Date: Mon, 06 Apr 2026 11:54:05 GMT
• Title: Dynamic Free-Rider Detection in Federated Learning via Simulated Attack Patterns
• Abstract summary: Federated learning (FL) enables clients to collaboratively train a global model by aggregating local updates without sharing private data.<n>Free-riders are clients who submit fake model parameters without performing actual training to obtain the global model.<n>We propose S2-WEF that simulates the WEF patterns of potential global-model-based attacks on the server side.
• Score: 0.0
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Federated learning (FL) enables multiple clients to collaboratively train a global model by aggregating local updates without sharing private data. However, FL often faces the challenge of free-riders, clients who submit fake model parameters without performing actual training to obtain the global model without contributing. Chen et al. proposed a free-rider detection method based on the weight evolving frequency (WEF) of model parameters. This detection approach is a leading candidate for practical free-rider detection methods, as it requires neither a proxy dataset nor pre-training. Nevertheless, it struggles to detect ``dynamic'' free-riders who behave honestly in early rounds and later switch to free-riding, particularly under global-model-mimicking attacks such as the delta weight attack and our newly proposed adaptive WEF-camouflage attack. In this paper, we propose a novel detection method S2-WEF that simulates the WEF patterns of potential global-model-based attacks on the server side using previously broadcasted global models, and identifies clients whose submitted WEF patterns resemble the simulated ones. To handle a variety of free-rider attack strategies, S2-WEF further combines this simulation-based similarity score with a deviation score computed from mutual comparisons among submitted WEFs, and separates benign and free-rider clients by two-dimensional clustering and per-score classification. This method enables dynamic detection of clients that transition into free-riders during training without proxy datasets or pre-training. We conduct extensive experiments across three datasets and five attack types, demonstrating that S2-WEF achieves higher robustness than existing approaches.

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