A Hierarchical Incentive Design Toward Motivating Participation in Coded Federated Learning

Federated Learning (FL) is a privacy-preserving collaborative learning approach that trains artificial intelligence (AI) models without revealing local datasets of the FL workers. While FL ensures the privacy of the FL workers, its performance is limited by several bottlenecks, which become significant given the increasing amounts of data generated and the size of the FL network. One of the main challenges is the straggler effects where the significant computation delays are caused by the slow FL workers. As such, Coded Federated Learning (CFL), which leverages coding techniques to introduce redundant computations to the FL server, has been proposed to reduce the computation latency. In CFL, the FL server helps to compute a subset of the partial gradients based on the composite parity data and aggregates the computed partial gradients with those received from the FL workers. In order to implement the coding schemes over the FL network, incentive mechanisms are important to allocate the resources of the FL workers and data owners efficiently in order to complete the CFL training tasks. In this paper, we consider a two-level incentive mechanism design problem. In the lower level, the data owners are allowed to support the FL training tasks of the FL workers by contributing their data. To model the dynamics of the selection of FL workers by the data owners, an evolutionary game is adopted to achieve an equilibrium solution. In the upper level, a deep learning based auction is proposed to model the competition among the model owners.