Incentivizing Socio-Ethical Integrity in Decentralized Machine Learning Ecosystems for Collaborative Knowledge Sharing

To broaden domain knowledge and enable advanced analytics, machine learning (ML) algorithms increasingly utilize comprehensive datasets across diverse sectors. However, these disparate datasets held by various stakeholders raise concerns over data heterogeneity, privacy, and security. Decentralized ML research aims to protect data privacy and integrate knowledge bases, especially knowledge graphs, to address data heterogeneity challenges. Yet, the question of how to foster trustworthy collaborations in decentralized ML ecosystems remains underexplored. This study pioneers two innovative socio-economic mechanisms designed to ensure dependable collaborations with socio-ethical integrity within a decentralized knowledge inference framework, enabling participants to share knowledge while maintaining data privacy and ethical standards. We employ an evolutionary game theory model to analyze the dynamic interactions between requestors and workers, focusing on achieving a stable equilibrium through theoretical and numerical evaluations. Furthermore, we explore how various critical factors, such as incentive schemes and the accuracy of identifying malicious workers, influence the system's equilibrium, providing insights into optimizing collaborative efforts in decentralized ML ecosystems.