A Model Value Transfer Incentive Mechanism for Federated Learning With Smart Contracts in AIoT

Introduced by Google in 2016, federated learning (FL) is a distributed machine learning framework to ensure data privacy amid the surge in big data. FL enables secure data sharing without accessing local data. Despite its advantages, it faces challenges due to the limited participation of the data owner. To address this, this article proposes the model value transfer incentive (MVTI) to enhance FL incentives for Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT). MVTI allows active participation of data requesters in FL training, addressing limited data owner engagement, and facilitating personalized model construction. The integrated model bail and contribution assessment mechanism ensures fair benefit redistribution. Using smart contracts (SCs) and interplanetary file system (IPFS) enhances security and reliability, ensuring transparent and tamper-resistant execution for secure transactions and data integrity. Our experiments highlight MVTI’s superiority in addressing FL incentive challenges for AIoT compared to state-of-the-art baselines on real-world datasets. We also demonstrate the compatibility of multiple gradient protections with incentive mechanisms, especially with gradient compression. The proposed SC-MVTI scheme is resilient and demonstrates the potential to significantly improve the overall efficacy of the FL system within incentive frameworks.