Federated learning (FL) has emerged as a prominent distributed learning paradigm to utilize datasets across multiple data providers. In FL, cross-silo data providers often hesitate to share their high-quality dataset unless their data value can be fairly assessed. Shapley value (SV) has been advocated as the standard metric for data valuation in FL due to its desirable properties. However, the computational overhead of SV is prohibitive in practice, as it inherently requires training and evaluating an FL model across an exponential number of dataset combinations. Furthermore, existing solutions fail to achieve high accuracy and efficiency, making practical use of SV still out of reach, because they ignore choosing suitable computation scheme for approximation framework and overlook the property of utility function in FL. We first propose a unified stratified-sampling framework for two widely-used schemes. Then, we analyze and choose the more promising scheme under the FL linear regression assumption. After that, we identify a phenomenon termed key combinations, where only limited dataset combinations have a high-impact on final data value. Building on these insights, we propose a practical approximation algorithm, IPSS, which strategically selects high-impact dataset combinations rather than evaluating all possible combinations, thus substantially reducing time cost with minor approximation error. Furthermore, we conduct extensive evaluations on the FL benchmark datasets to demonstrate that our proposed algorithm outperforms a series of representative baselines in terms of efficiency and effectiveness.

Federated Foundation Models (FedFMs) represent a distributed learning paradigm that fuses general competences of foundation models as well as privacy-preserving capabilities of federated learning. This combination allows the large foundation models and the small local domain models at the remote clients to learn from each other in a teacher-student learning setting. This paper provides a comprehensive summary of the ten challenging problems inherent in FedFMs, encompassing foundational theory, utilization of private data, continual learning, unlearning, Non-IID and graph data, bidirectional knowledge transfer, incentive mechanism design, game mechanism design, model watermarking, and efficiency. The ten challenging problems manifest in five pivotal aspects: “Foundational Theory,” which aims to establish a coherent and unifying theoretical framework for FedFMs. “Data,” addressing the difficulties in leveraging domain-specific knowledge from private data while maintaining privacy; “Heterogeneity,” examining variations in data, model, and computational resources across clients; “Security and Privacy,” focusing on defenses against malicious attacks and model theft; and “Efficiency,” highlighting the need for improvements in training, communication, and parameter efficiency. For each problem, we offer a clear mathematical definition on the objective function, analyze existing methods, and discuss the key challenges and potential solutions. This in-depth exploration aims to advance the theoretical foundations of FedFMs, guide practical implementations, and inspire future research to overcome these obstacles, thereby enabling the robust, efficient, and privacy-preserving FedFMs in various real-world applications.

Graph-based methods have witnessed tremendous success in traffic prediction, largely attributed to their superior ability in capturing and modeling spatial dependencies. However, urban-scale traffic data are usually distributed among various owners, limited in sharing due to privacy restrictions. This fragmentation of data severely hinders interaction across clients, impeding the utilization of inter-client spatial dependencies. Existing studies have yet to address this non-trivial issue, thereby leading to sub-optimal performance. To fill this gap, we propose FedGTP, a new federated graph-based traffic prediction framework that promotes adaptive exploitation of inter-client spatial dependencies to recover close-to-optimal performance complying with privacy regulations like GDPR. We validate FedGTP via large-scale application-driven experiments on real-world datasets. Extensive baseline comparison, ablation study and case study demonstrate that FedGTP indeed surpasses existing methods through fully recovering inter-client spatial dependencies, achieving 21.08%, 13.48%, 19.90% decrease on RMSE, MAE and MAPE, respectively. Our code is available at https://github.com/LarryHawkingYoung/KDD2024_FedGTP

Shared mobility leverages under-utilized vehicles to offer on-demand transport services by sharing vehicles among users. It strives to match supply with demand via a series of data-intensive operations such as supply prediction and task assignment. However, its full potential is often compromised in practice as most shared mobility platforms operate in isolation, leading to sub-optimal resource utilization. In this demonstration, we advocate a federated approach to shared mobility, which enhances its effectiveness by enabling optimizations across platforms while retaining their autonomy. We develop privacy-preserving operators and incentive mechanisms dedicated to supply prediction and task assignment in shared mobility and implement generic interfaces that support diverse prediction and assignment algorithms. We showcase the shared mobility system with real-world ride-hailing applications.

Online real estate platforms are gaining increasing popularity, where a central issue is to match brokers with clients for potential housing transactions. Mainstream platforms match brokers via top-k recommendation. Yet we observe through extensive data analysis that such top-k recommendation tends to overload the top brokers, which notably degrades their service quality. In this paper, we propose to avoid such overloading in broker matching via the paradigm shift from recommendation to assignment. To this end, we design learned assignment with contextual bandits (LACB), a data-driven capacity-aware assignment scheme for broker matching which estimates broker-specific workload capacity in an online fashion and assigns brokers to clients from a global perspective to maximize the overall service quality. Extensive evaluations on synthetic and real-world datasets from an industrial online real estate platform validate the efficiency and effectiveness of our solution.

Sustained work enthusiasms of drivers are crucial for the success of large-scale ride-hailing platforms. In this paper, we conduct the first-of-its-kind exploration to encourage active participation of drivers via competition. We design Arena, a competition where drivers compete for prizes via completing more trips. Through a pilot study covering over 2,600 participants, we uncover the easy-win problem, an overlooked and serious issue in competition design for real-world drivers. It refers to situations where one competitor does not show up during competition whereas the other easily wins. To solve the easy-win problem without impairing motivation of drivers, we devise a novel prediction-based matchmaking framework. On observing that no-shows are highly correlated to the online time of drivers during competition, we propose to identify potential no-shows by predicting drivers' online time and avoid matching potential noshow drivers with drivers that will show up so as to reduce easy-wins. We conduct large-scale experiments based on real competition data involving over 10,000 drivers. The results show that our prediction-based matchmaking scheme can effectively reduce the ratio of easy-wins.

Due to stricter data management regulations such as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), traditional production mode of machine learning services is shifting to federated learning, a paradigm that allows multiple data providers to train a joint model collaboratively with their data kept locally. A key enabler for practical adoption of federated learning is how to allocate the prolit earned by the joint model to each data provider. For fair prolit allocation, a metric to quantify the contribution of each data provider to the joint model is essential. Shapley value is a classical concept in cooperative game theory which assigns a unique distribution (among the players) of a total surplus generated by the coalition of all players and has been used for data valuation in machine learning services. However, prior Shapley value based data valuation schemes either do not apply to federated learning or involve extra model training which leads to high cost. In this paper, given n data providers with data sets D1, D2, ⋯, Dn, a federated learning algorithm A and a standard test set T, we propose the contribution index, a new Shapley value based metric lit for assessing the contribution of each data provider for the joint model trained by federated learning. The contribution index shares the same properties as Shapley value. However, direct calculation of the contribution index is time consuming, since a large number of joint models with different combinations of data sets are required to be trained and evaluated. To solve this problem, we propose two gradient based methods. The idea is to reconstruct approximately the models on different combinations of the data sets through the intermediate results of the training process of federated learning so as to avoid extra training. The lirst method reconstructs models by updating the initial global model in federated learning with the gradients in different rounds. Then it calculates the contribution index by the performance of these reconstructed models. The second method calculates contribution index in each round by updating the global model in the previous round with the gradients in the current round. Contribution indexes of multiple rounds are then added with elaborated weights to get the linal result. We conduct extensive experiments on the MNIST data set in different settings. The results demonstrate that the proposed methods can approximate the exact contribution index effectively and achieve a time speed up of up to 2x-100x compared with the exact calculation and other baselines extended from existing work.