Incentives in Private Collaborative Machine Learning
Main Conference Track
Authors: Rachael Sim, Yehong Zhang, Nghia Hoang, Xinyi Xu, Bryan Kian Hsiang Low, Patrick Jaillet

Collaborative machine learning involves training models on data from multiple parties but must incentivize their participation. Existing data valuation methods fairly value and reward each party based on  shared data or model parameters but neglect the privacy risks involved. To address this, we introduce differential privacy (DP) as an incentive. Each party can select its required DP guarantee and perturb its sufficient statistic (SS) accordingly. The mediator values the perturbed SS by the Bayesian surprise it elicits about the model parameters. As our valuation function enforces a privacy-valuation trade-off, parties are deterred from selecting excessive DP guarantees that reduce the utility of the grand coalition's model. Finally, the mediator rewards each party with different posterior samples of the model parameters. Such rewards still satisfy existing incentives like fairness but additionally preserve DP and a high similarity to the grand coalition's posterior. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness and practicality of our approach on synthetic and real-world datasets.