arXiv Machine Learning By Drashthi Doshi, Avishek Ghosh, Swaprava Nath

Incentivize Contribution and Learn Parameters Too: Federated Learning with Strategic Data Owners

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The paper proposes mechanisms for federated learning that both incentivize strategic data owners to contribute fully and learn a high‑quality model. The first mechanism, UPBReD, jointly updates client contributions and the model, converging to a Nash equilibrium that may involve under‑contribution. The second mechanism, 2P‑UPBReD, introduces budget‑balanced transfers to make full contribution a dominant strategy, ensuring convergence to the optimal model while guaranteeing that all clients prefer to participate. Subsequent extensions (T‑2P‑UPBReD) further enforce truthful reporting of contributions and gradients without running a deficit, and experiments on CIFAR‑10, FEMNIST, and Twitter demonstrate that 2P‑UPBReD achieves welfare comparable to FedAvg trained on all data.

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arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 15

Pathwise Individual Rationality in Federated Learning: A Mechanism-Architecture Co-Design

The paper investigates the trade‑off between the costs of participating in federated learning (privacy, communication, compute) and the potential gains in model performance, framing this as a game‑theoretic problem of individual rationality versus autarky. It shows that clients can remain below their local‑training baseline for many rounds and that simply capping per‑round contributions harms learning. The authors propose a new mechanism that provides short‑term participation guarantees and personalized model evaluation, demonstrating theoretically and empirically that clients can avoid short‑term losses without significantly harming overall performance, even under moderate heterogeneity.

By Amin Meghrazi, Srinivasan Parthasarathy, Andrew Perrault