LocFedMix-SL: Localize, Federate, and Mix for Improved Scalability, Convergence, and Latency in Split Learning

Split learning (SL) is a promising distributed learning framework that enables to utilize the huge data and parallel computing resources of mobile devices. SL is built upon a model-split architecture, wherein a server stores an upper model segment that is shared by different mobile clients storing its lower model segments. Without exchanging raw data, SL achieves high accuracy and fast convergence by only uploading smashed data from clients and downloading global gradients from the server. Nonetheless, the original implementation of SL sequentially serves multiple clients, incurring high latency with many clients. A parallel implementation of SL has great potential in reducing latency, yet existing parallel SL algorithms resort to compromising scalability and/or convergence speed. Motivated by this, the goal of this article is to develop a scalable parallel SL algorithm with fast convergence and low latency. As a first step, we identify that the fundamental bottleneck of existing parallel SL comes from the model-split and parallel computing architectures, under which the server-client model updates are often imbalanced, and the client models are prone to detach from the server’s model. To fix this problem, by carefully integrating local parallelism, federated learning, and mixup augmentation techniques, we propose a novel parallel SL framework, coined LocFedMix-SL. Simulation results corroborate that LocFedMix-SL achieves improved scalability, convergence speed, and latency, compared to sequential SL as well as the state-of-the-art parallel SL algorithms such as SplitFed and LocSplitFed.