Intrinsic Performance Influence-based Participant Contribution Estimation for Horizontal Federated Learning

The rapid development of modern artificial intelligence technique is mainly attributed to sufficient and high-quality data. However, in the data collection, personal privacy is at risk of being leaked. This issue can be addressed by federated learning, which is proposed to achieve efficient model training among multiple data providers without direct data access and aggregation. To encourage more parties owning high-quality data to participate in the federated learning, it is important to evaluate and reward the participant contribution in a reasonable, robust, and efficient manner. To achieve this goal, we propose a novel contribution estimation method: Intrinsic Performance Influence-based Contribution Estimation (IPICE). In particular, the class-level intrinsic performance influence is adopted as the contribution estimation criteria in IPICE, and a neural network is employed to exploit the non-linear relationship between the performance change and estimated contribution. Extensive experiments are conducted on various datasets, and the results demonstrate that IPICE is more accurate and stable than the counterpart in various data distribution settings. The computational complexity is significantly reduced in our IPICE, especially when a new party joins the federation. IPICE assigns small contributions to bad/garbage data and thus prevent them from participating and deteriorating the learning ecosystem.