Byzantine-Resilient Federated Large Language Model via Hypergraph Message Passing

Abstract

Federated Large Language Models (FedLLMs) are promising to deliver privacy-preserving, collaborative intelligence. The decentralized training process is vulnerable to Byzantine attacks that corrupt semantic consistency and factual resilience through malicious model updates. This paper presents a new resilience strategy that prevents semantically corrupted knowledge from propagating during federated aggregation. A defense problem is formulated to jointly maximize global accuracy and suppress manipulated model updates, enabling trustworthy knowledge aggregation without accessing private local data. To strengthen the resilience of FedLLMs, we develop a novel Hypergraph Message Passing Graph Autoencoder (HMP-GAE) framework, where low-rank model updates are represented as nodes in a hypergraph and high-order semantic relationships among multiple agents are exploited through iterative message passing. By leveraging historical checkpoints and cross-agent relational reasoning, HMP-GAE identifies and suppresses semantically inconsistent updates while preserving knowledge alignment among agents throughout federated training. HMP-GAE is implemented using Qwen-2.5 and Llama-3.2 as pretrained FedLLM backbones and evaluated on AG News and Yahoo! Answers datasets. Compared to existing defenses, HMP-GAE improves global accuracy by $1.21$\%, reduces final-model classification semantic entropy by $44.08$\%, and lowers perplexity by $13.34$\%. HMP-GAE outperforms the GAE-based defense by improving the accuracy $1.39$\%, reducing the semantic entropy by $54.5$\%, and lowering perplexity by $35.5$\%.