Efficient Core-selecting Incentive Mechanism for Data Sharing in Federated Learning

Abstract: Federated learning is a distributed machine learning system that uses participants' data to train an improved global model. In federated learning, participants cooperatively train a global model, and they will receive the global model and payments. Rational participants try to maximize their individual utility, and they will not input their high-quality data truthfully unless they are provided with satisfactory payments based on their data quality. Furthermore, federated learning benefits from the cooperative contributions of participants. Accordingly, how to establish an incentive mechanism that both incentivizes inputting data truthfully and promotes stable cooperation has become an important issue to consider. In this paper, we introduce a data sharing game model for federated learning and employ game-theoretic approaches to design a core-selecting incentive mechanism by utilizing a popular concept in cooperative games, the core. In federated learning, the core can be empty, resulting in the core-selecting mechanism becoming infeasible. To address this, our core-selecting mechanism employs a relaxation method and simultaneously minimizes the benefits of inputting false data for all participants. However, this mechanism is computationally expensive because it requires aggregating exponential models for all possible coalitions, which is infeasible in federated learning. To address this, we propose an efficient core-selecting mechanism based on sampling approximation that only aggregates models on sampled coalitions to approximate the exact result. Extensive experiments verify that the efficient core-selecting mechanism can incentivize inputting high-quality data and stable cooperation, while it reduces computational overhead compared to the core-selecting mechanism.