This paper introduces an advanced approach for fortifying Federated Learning (FL) systems against label-flipping attacks. We propose a simplified consensus-based verification process integrated with an adaptive thresholding mechanism. This dynamic thresholding is designed to adjust based on the evolving landscape of model updates, offering a refined layer of anomaly detection that aligns with the real-time needs of distributed learning environments. Our method necessitates a majority consensus among participating clients to validate updates, ensuring that only vetted and consensual modifications are applied to the global model. The efficacy of our approach is validated through experiments on two benchmark datasets in deep learning, CIFAR-10 and MNIST. Our results indicate a significant mitigation of label-flipping attacks, bolstering the FL system's resilience. This method transcends conventional techniques that depend on anomaly detection or statistical validation by incorporating a verification layer reminiscent of blockchain's participatory validation without the associated cryptographic overhead. The innovation of our approach rests in striking an optimal balance between heightened security measures and the inherent limitations of FL systems, such as computational efficiency and data privacy. Implementing a consensus mechanism specifically tailored for FL environments paves the way for more secure, robust, and trustworthy distributed machine learning applications, where safeguarding data integrity and model robustness is critical.

With the democratization of e-commerce platforms, an increasingly diversified user base is opting to shop online. To provide a comfortable and reliable shopping experience, it's important to enable users to interact with the platform in the language of their choice. An accurate query translation is essential for Cross-Lingual Information Retrieval (CLIR) with vernacular queries. Due to internet-scale operations, e-commerce platforms get millions of search queries every day. However, creating a parallel training set to train an in-domain translation model is cumbersome. This paper proposes an unsupervised domain adaptation approach to translate search queries without using any parallel corpus. We use an open-domain translation model (trained on public corpus) and adapt it to the query data using only the monolingual queries from two languages. In addition, fine-tuning with a small labeled set further improves the result. For demonstration, we show results for Hindi to English query translation and use mBART-large-50 model as the baseline to improve upon. Experimental results show that, without using any parallel corpus, we obtain more than 20 BLEU points improvement over the baseline while fine-tuning with a small 50k labeled set provides more than 27 BLEU points improvement over the baseline.