TraCemop: Toward Federated Learning With Traceable Contribution Evaluation and Model Ownership Protection

Abstract

Federated Learning (FL) allows multiple clients to collaboratively train machine learning models without the need to share their local private data. As a result, it can effectively address the issue of data fragmentation. Nevertheless, insufficient evaluation of individual contributions and the lack of protections for both the intellectual property rights (IPR) of models and client privacy can greatly reduce clients’ motivations in federated training. To address these challenges, this paper introduces the Traceable Contribution Evaluation and Model Ownership Protection (TraCemop) framework for federated learning, which allows each client to swiftly assess the contributions of others in each round, with integrated support for the traceability of evaluation results. To safeguard the intellectual property of models, a collective watermark is embedded in the global model. Additionally, a secure mechanism for verifying model ownership is also available in case of disputes. Security analysis indicates that TraCemop is capable of resisting data reconstruction attacks as well as various types of model copyright infringements. Finally, we evaluate the proposed framework using two commonly-used datasets, and the experimental results show a significant improvement in the efficiency of contribution evaluation compared to existing methods. Meanwhile, IPR infringement tests on TraCemop reveal that the proposed framework is resilient against malicious efforts to monopolize model ownership.