Compression Footprints as Security Signals for Model-Poisoning Defense in Federated Learning

תקציר מקורי באנגליתarXiv:2609.40312v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Lossy compression is widely used in Federated Learning (FL) but is generally treated as an error source, while conventional poisoning defenses inspect update geometry. In this work, we instead treat the compressor's response as a security signal: the input-dependent distortion and payload behavior induced by lossy compression can expose differences between honest and attack-generated updates. We introduce the concept of a \emph{compression footprint}: the low-dimensional collection of reconstruction, directional, sparsity, and payload statistics induced by a lossy compressor. We characterize sufficient conditions under which compression footprints separate honest and malicious updates, and operationalize our findings in the CRAFT (\emph{Compr