Aequa: Fair Model Rewards in Collaborative Learning via Slimmable Networks

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Tastan, Nurbek, Horvath, Samuel, Nandakumar, Karthik
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Tastan, Nurbek
Horvath, Samuel
Nandakumar, Karthik
author_facet Tastan, Nurbek
Horvath, Samuel
Nandakumar, Karthik
contents Collaborative learning enables multiple participants to learn a single global model by exchanging focused updates instead of sharing data. One of the core challenges in collaborative learning is ensuring that participants are rewarded fairly for their contributions, which entails two key sub-problems: contribution assessment and reward allocation. This work focuses on fair reward allocation, where the participants are incentivized through model rewards - differentiated final models whose performance is commensurate with the contribution. In this work, we leverage the concept of slimmable neural networks to collaboratively learn a shared global model whose performance degrades gracefully with a reduction in model width. We also propose a post-training fair allocation algorithm that determines the model width for each participant based on their contributions. We theoretically study the convergence of our proposed approach and empirically validate it using extensive experiments on different datasets and architectures. We also extend our approach to enable training-time model reward allocation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_04850
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Aequa: Fair Model Rewards in Collaborative Learning via Slimmable Networks
Tastan, Nurbek
Horvath, Samuel
Nandakumar, Karthik
Machine Learning
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Collaborative learning enables multiple participants to learn a single global model by exchanging focused updates instead of sharing data. One of the core challenges in collaborative learning is ensuring that participants are rewarded fairly for their contributions, which entails two key sub-problems: contribution assessment and reward allocation. This work focuses on fair reward allocation, where the participants are incentivized through model rewards - differentiated final models whose performance is commensurate with the contribution. In this work, we leverage the concept of slimmable neural networks to collaboratively learn a shared global model whose performance degrades gracefully with a reduction in model width. We also propose a post-training fair allocation algorithm that determines the model width for each participant based on their contributions. We theoretically study the convergence of our proposed approach and empirically validate it using extensive experiments on different datasets and architectures. We also extend our approach to enable training-time model reward allocation.
title Aequa: Fair Model Rewards in Collaborative Learning via Slimmable Networks
topic Machine Learning
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.04850