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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.01098 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01098/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 3 Sep 2023.

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Threats and Defenses in Federated Learning Life Cycle: A Comprehensive Survey and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06754/) (2024)
- [BlockA2A: Towards Secure and Verifiable Agent-to-Agent Interoperability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01332/) (2025)
- [A Framework for Cryptographic Verifiability of End-to-End AI Pipelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22573/) (2025)
- [Pencil: Private and Extensible Collaborative Learning without the Non-Colluding Assumption](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11166/) (2024)
- [FLMarket: Enabling Privacy-preserved Pre-training Data Pricing for Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.11713/) (2024)
- [A2-DIDM: Privacy-preserving Accumulator-enabled Auditing for Distributed Identity of DNN Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04108/) (2024)
- [Nonlinear Equilibrium Transitions in a Potential Game Model for Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.11793/) (2024)
- [On the Inference (In-)Security of Vertical Federated Learning: Efficient Auditing against Inference Tampering Attack](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02376/) (2025)
- [Benchmarking Robust Aggregation in Decentralized Gradient Marketplaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.05833/) (2025)
- [Verifiable Split Learning via zk-SNARKs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.01356/) (2025)
- [D2M: A Decentralized, Privacy-Preserving, Incentive-Compatible Data Marketplace for Collaborative Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10372/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.