Stable and Budget-Feasible Coalition Formation for Clustered Federated Learning: A Hedonic Potential-Game Approach

תקציר מקורי באנגליתarXiv:2607.26788v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Clustered federated learning benefits from organizing heterogeneous participants into coalitions that train coalition-specific models, but such clustering is sustainable only if participants prefer their assigned coalition and the required transfers are affordable. We develop a transferable-surplus model separating learning benefit, system cost, participant cost, and monetary transfers; an allocation rule converts coalition surplus into hedonic preferences, and weak budget feasibility guarantees nonnegative retained coordinator surplus. For symmetric pairwise allocations the induced game is an exact potential game: a Nash-stable partition exists, every strict better-response process converges, and with destination consent accepted better re