Federated learning (FL) strives to enable collaborative training of machine
learning models without centrally collecting clients' private data. Different
from centralized training, the local datasets across clients in FL are
non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID). In addition, the
data-owning clients may drop out of the training process arbitrarily. These
characteristics will significantly degrade the training performance. This paper
proposes a Dropout-Resilient Secure Federated Learning (DReS-FL) framework
based on Lagrange coded computing (LCC) to tackle both the non-IID and dropout
problems. The key idea is to utilize Lagrange coding to secretly share the
private datasets among clients so that each client receives an encoded version
of the global dataset, and the local gradient computation over this dataset is
unbiased. To correctly decode the gradient at the server, the gradient function
has to be a polynomial in a finite field, and thus we construct polynomial
integer neural networks (PINNs) to enable our framework. Theoretical analysis
shows that DReS-FL is resilient to client dropouts and provides privacy
protection for the local datasets. Furthermore, we experimentally demonstrate
that DReS-FL consistently leads to significant performance gains over baseline
methods.