On Johnson-Lindenstrauss Transforms for Byzantine-Robust Optimization

Overview & Synopsis

The growing scale of data and models in machine learning calls for efficient optimization methods. Distributed optimization addresses this challenge, with compression mechanisms helping to reduce communication costs. A classical tool for dimensionality reduction is the Johnson-Lindenstrauss (JL) transform, which is simple to implement and offers strong geometric guarantees. In particular, JL transforms approximately preserve inner products and pairwise distances between vectors with high probability. In this paper, we exploit this property in Byzantine-robust optimization, where worker messages are weighted according to their alignment with a trusted reference gradient. We further support our theoretical findings with experimental results.