ECSE student Zhaoxian Wu and faculty Prof. Tianyi Chen were awarded the 2024 IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) Young Author Best Paper Award, for the paper entitled “Federated Variance-Reduced Stochastic Gradient Descent with Robustness to Byzantine Attacks”, and authored with Prof. Qing Ling, and Prof. Georgios B. Giannakis from the University of Minnesota. The award ceremony will take place in April 2025 during the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) in Hyderabad, India. Zhaoxian Wu, the first author of the paper, completed his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Sun Yat-Sen University, China, in 2020 and 2023, respectively, under the supervision of Prof. Qing Ling. The paper was submitted while he was a master’s student at Sun Yat-Sen University. Since 2023, Zhaoxian has been pursuing his Ph.D. at RPI under the supervision of Prof. Tianyi Chen.
The award-winning paper, published in 2020 in IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, tackles robustness challenges in distributed machine learning, a key technology for managing the exponential growth of model sizes and data volumes while improving computational efficiency. It focuses on mitigating disruptions caused by Byzantine nodes—malicious participants that sabotage learning by sending incorrect information. The paper is the first to theoretically demonstrate how gradient noise impacts system robustness, showing that Byzantine nodes can exploit higher gradient noise to strengthen their attacks. To address this, the paper introduces gradient variance reduction into algorithm design, significantly improving robustness and reducing errors. The paper offers rigorous analysis and innovative solutions, establishing a foundation for subsequent research, and has garnered over 200 citations.
The IEEE SPS Young Author Best Paper Award is a prestigious honor established by the IEEE Signal Processing Society to recognize high-quality papers with significant innovation and impact, published in the society’s journals within the past four years. The award is presented annually, and recipients must be under 30 years of age at the time of submission.