martFL: Enabling Utility-Driven Data Marketplace with a Robust and Verifiable Federated Learning Architecture

The development of machine learning models requires a large amount of training data. Data marketplaces are essential for trading high-quality, private-domain data not publicly available online. However, due to growing data privacy concerns, direct data exchange is inappropriate. Federated Learning (FL) is a distributed machine learning paradigm that exchanges data utilities (in form of local models or gradients) among multiple parties without directly sharing the raw data. However, several challenges exist when applying existing FL architectures to construct a data marketplace: (i) In existing FL architectures, Data Acquirers (DAs) cannot privately evaluate local models from Data Providers (DPs) prior to trading; (ii) Model aggregation protocols in existing FL designs struggle to exclude malicious DPs without "overfitting" to the DA's (possibly biased) root dataset; (iii) Prior FL designs lack a proper billing mechanism to enforce the DA to fairly allocate the reward according to contributions made by different DPs. To address above challenges, we propose martFL, the first federated learning architecture that is specifically designed to enable a secure utility-driven data marketplace. At a high level, martFL is powered by two innovative designs: (i) a quality-aware model aggregation protocol that achieves robust local model aggregation even when the DA's root dataset is biased; (ii) a verifiable data transaction protocol that enables the DA to prove, both succinctly and in zero-knowledge, that it has faithfully aggregates the local models submitted by different DPs according to the committed aggregation weights, based on which the DPs can unambiguously claim the corresponding reward. We implement a prototype of martFL and evaluate it extensively over various tasks. The results show that martFL can improve the model accuracy by up to 25% while saving up to 64% data acquisition cost.