We introduce CyBeR-0, a Byzantine-resilient federated zero-order optimization
method that is robust under Byzantine attacks and provides significant savings
in uplink and downlink communication costs. We introduce transformed robust
aggregation to give convergence guarantees for general non-convex objectives
under client data heterogeneity. Empirical evaluations for standard learning
tasks and fine-tuning large language models show that CyBeR-0 exhibits stable
performance with only a few scalars per-round communication cost and reduced
memory requirements.