Motivating Workers in Federated Learning: A Stackelberg Game Perspective

Due to the large size of the training data, distributed learning approaches such as federated learning have gained attention recently. However, the convergence rate of distributed learning suffers from heterogeneous worker performance. In this letter, we consider an incentive mechanism for workers to mitigate the delays in completion of each batch. We analytically obtained equilibrium solution of a Stackelberg game. Our numerical results indicate that with a limited budget, the model owner should judiciously decide on the number of workers due to trade off between the diversity provided by the number of workers and the latency of completing the training.