Competitive-Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Auction-based Federated Learning

Abstract

Auction-based Federated Learning (AFL) enables open collaboration among self-interested data consumers and data owners. Existing AFL approaches cannot manage the mutual influence among multiple data consumers competing to enlist data owners. Moreover, they cannot support a single data owner to join multiple data consumers simultaneously. To bridge these gaps, we propose the Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for AFL (MARL-AFL) approach to steer data consumers to bid strategically towards an equilibrium with desirable overall system characteristics. We design a temperature-based reward reassignment scheme to make tradeoffs between cooperation and competition among AFL data consumers. In this way, it can reach an equilibrium state that ensures individual data consumers can achieve good utility, while preserving system-level social welfare. To circumvent potential collusion behaviors among data consumers, we introduce a bar agent to set a personalized bidding lower bound for each data consumer. Extensive experiments on six commonly adopted benchmark datasets show that MARL-AFL is significantly more advantageous compared to six state-of-the-art approaches, outperforming the best by 12.2%, 1.9% and 3.4% in terms of social welfare, revenue and accuracy, respectively.