Robust Federated Clustering under Heterogeneity and Adversaries

Clustering distributed and private data is an increasingly important task across domains that handle sensitive information, such as life sciences and clinical research. In federated settings, clustering faces three challenges: heterogeneous client data distributions, adversarial behavior, and strict privacy requirements. Existing approaches often exhibit significant performance degradation under these conditions and fail to return accurate solutions. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a novel federated clustering algorithm that combines client-level differential privacy with Byzantine-robust aggregation at the server, based on a novel efficient and robust clustering procedure. Our method comes with theoretical robustness guarantees, and through extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world data, we demonstrate that it produces high-quality clusters in just a few communication rounds, even in scenarios where state-of-the-art methods fail.