Incentive Mechanism Design for Federated Learning and Unlearning

Ningning Ding, Zhenyu Sun, Ermin Wei, Randall Berry

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

6 Scopus citations

Abstract

To protect users' right to be forgotten in federated learning, federated unlearning aims at eliminating the impact of leaving users' data on the global learned model. The current research in federated unlearning mainly concentrated on developing effective and efficient unlearning techniques. However, the issue of incentivizing valuable users to remain engaged and preventing their data from being unlearned is still under-explored, yet important to the unlearned model performance. This paper focuses on the incentive issue and develops an incentive mechanism for federated learning and unlearning. We first characterize the leaving users' impact on the global model accuracy and the required communication rounds for unlearning. Building on these results, we propose a four-stage game to capture the interaction and information updates during the learning and unlearning process. A key contribution is to summarize users' multi-dimensional private information into one-dimensional metrics to guide the incentive design. We show that users who incur high costs and experience significant training losses are more likely to discontinue their engagement through federated unlearning. The server tends to retain users who make substantial contributions to the model but has a trade-off on users' training losses, as large training losses of retained users increase privacy costs but decrease unlearning costs. The numerical results demonstrate the necessity of unlearning incentives for retaining valuable leaving users, and also show that our proposed mechanisms decrease the server's cost by up to 53.91% compared to state-of-the-art benchmarks.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationMobiHoc 2023 - Proceedings of the 2023 International Symposium on Theory, Algorithmic Foundations, and Protocol Design for Mobile Networks and Mobile Computing
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages11-20
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9781450399265
DOIs
StatePublished - Oct 23 2023
Event2023 International Symposium on Theory, Algorithmic Foundations, and Protocol Design for Mobile Networks and Mobile Computing, MobiHoc 2023 - Washington, United States
Duration: Oct 23 2023Oct 26 2023

Publication series

NameProceedings of the International Symposium on Mobile Ad Hoc Networking and Computing (MobiHoc)

Conference

Conference2023 International Symposium on Theory, Algorithmic Foundations, and Protocol Design for Mobile Networks and Mobile Computing, MobiHoc 2023
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityWashington
Period10/23/2310/26/23

Funding

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under grant ECCS-2030251. REFERENCES

Keywords

  • federated learning
  • federated unlearning
  • incentive mechanism

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Software

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