Blockchain Empowered Reliable Federated Learning by Worker Selection : A Trustworthy Reputation Evaluation Method

Federated learning is a distributed machine learning framework that enables distributed model training with local datasets, which can effectively protect the data privacy of workers (i.e., intelligent edge nodes). The majority of federated learning algorithms assume that the workers are trusted and voluntarily participate in the cooperative model training process. However, the situation in practical application is not consistent with this. There are many challenges such as worker selection schemes for participating workers, which hamper the widespread adoption of federated learning. The existing research about worker selection scheme focused on multi-weight subjective logic model to calculate reputation value and adopted contract theory to motivate workers, which may exist subjective judgmental factors and unfair profit distribution. To address above challenges, we calculate the reputation value by model quality parameters to evaluate the reliability of workers. Blockchain is designed to store historical reputation value that realized tamper-resistance and non-repudiation. Numerical results indicate that the worker selection scheme can improve the accuracy of the model and accelerate the model convergence.