Incentivized Federated Learning and Unlearning
Ningning Ding, Zhenyu Sun, Ermin Wei, Randall Berry · IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing · 2025
To protect users'right to be forgottenin 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 concentrates 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. Interestingly, we prove that allowing federated unlearning can result in reduced payoffs for both the server and users, compared to a scenario without unlearning. 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.