Decentral and Incentivized Federated Learning Frameworks: A Systematic Literature Review

The advent of federated learning (FL) has sparked a new paradigm of parallel and confidential decentralized machine learning (ML) with the potential of utilizing the computational power of a vast number of Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, and edge devices without data leaving the respective device, thus ensuring privacy by design. Yet, simple FL frameworks (FLFs) naively assume an honest central server and altruistic client participation. In order to scale this new paradigm beyond small groups of already entrusted entities toward mass adoption, FLFs must be: 1) truly decentralized and 2) incentivized to participants. This systematic literature review is the first to analyze FLFs that holistically apply both, the blockchain technology to decentralize the process and reward mechanisms to incentivize participation. 422 publications were retrieved by querying 12 major scientific databases. After a systematic filtering process, 40 articles remained for an in-depth examination following our five research questions. To ensure the correctness of our findings, we verified the examination results with the respective authors. Although having the potential to direct the future of distributed and secure artificial intelligence, none of the analyzed FLFs is production ready. The approaches vary heavily in terms of use cases, system design, solved issues, and thoroughness. We provide a systematic approach to classify and quantify differences between FLFs, expose limitations of current works and derive future directions for research in this novel domain.