Incentive-Aware Federated Averaging with Performance Guarantees under Strategic Participation

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Maleki, Fateme, Raghavan, Krishnan, Yousefian, Farzad
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Maleki, Fateme
Raghavan, Krishnan
Yousefian, Farzad
author_facet Maleki, Fateme
Raghavan, Krishnan
Yousefian, Farzad
contents Federated learning (FL) is a communication-efficient collaborative learning framework that enables model training across multiple agents with private local datasets. While the benefits of FL in improving global model performance are well established, individual agents may behave strategically, balancing the learning payoff against the cost of contributing their local data. Motivated by the need for FL frameworks that successfully retain participating agents, we propose an incentive-aware federated averaging method in which, at each communication round, clients transmit both their local model parameters and their updated training dataset sizes to the server. The dataset sizes are dynamically adjusted via a Nash equilibrium (NE)-seeking update rule that captures strategic data participation. We analyze the proposed method under convex and nonconvex global objective settings and establish performance guarantees for the resulting incentive-aware FL algorithm. Furthermore, under a merely monotone game setting, we consider a welfare loss minimization framework and establish asymptotic convergence of the scheme. Numerical experiments on the MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets demonstrate that agents achieve competitive global model performance while converging to stable data participation strategies.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_20873
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Incentive-Aware Federated Averaging with Performance Guarantees under Strategic Participation
Maleki, Fateme
Raghavan, Krishnan
Yousefian, Farzad
Machine Learning
Optimization and Control
Federated learning (FL) is a communication-efficient collaborative learning framework that enables model training across multiple agents with private local datasets. While the benefits of FL in improving global model performance are well established, individual agents may behave strategically, balancing the learning payoff against the cost of contributing their local data. Motivated by the need for FL frameworks that successfully retain participating agents, we propose an incentive-aware federated averaging method in which, at each communication round, clients transmit both their local model parameters and their updated training dataset sizes to the server. The dataset sizes are dynamically adjusted via a Nash equilibrium (NE)-seeking update rule that captures strategic data participation. We analyze the proposed method under convex and nonconvex global objective settings and establish performance guarantees for the resulting incentive-aware FL algorithm. Furthermore, under a merely monotone game setting, we consider a welfare loss minimization framework and establish asymptotic convergence of the scheme. Numerical experiments on the MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets demonstrate that agents achieve competitive global model performance while converging to stable data participation strategies.
title Incentive-Aware Federated Averaging with Performance Guarantees under Strategic Participation
topic Machine Learning
Optimization and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.20873