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Main Authors: Nair, Srijith, Lin, Michael, Ju, Peizhong, Talebi, Amirreza, Bentley, Elizabeth Serena, Liu, Jia
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.23182
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author Nair, Srijith
Lin, Michael
Ju, Peizhong
Talebi, Amirreza
Bentley, Elizabeth Serena
Liu, Jia
author_facet Nair, Srijith
Lin, Michael
Ju, Peizhong
Talebi, Amirreza
Bentley, Elizabeth Serena
Liu, Jia
contents Collaborative training methods like Federated Learning (FL) and Split Learning (SL) enable distributed machine learning without sharing raw data. However, FL assumes clients can train entire models, which is infeasible for large-scale models. In contrast, while SL alleviates the client memory constraint in FL by offloading most training to the server, it increases network latency due to its sequential nature. Other methods address the conundrum by using local loss functions for parallel client-side training to improve efficiency, but they lack server feedback and potentially suffer poor accuracy. We propose FSL-SAGE (Federated Split Learning via Smashed Activation Gradient Estimation), a new federated split learning algorithm that estimates server-side gradient feedback via auxiliary models. These auxiliary models periodically adapt to emulate server behavior on local datasets. We show that FSL-SAGE achieves a convergence rate of $\mathcal{O}(1/\sqrt{T})$, where $T$ is the number of communication rounds. This result matches FedAvg, while significantly reducing communication costs and client memory requirements. Our empirical results also verify that it outperforms existing state-of-the-art FSL methods, offering both communication efficiency and accuracy.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_23182
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle FSL-SAGE: Accelerating Federated Split Learning via Smashed Activation Gradient Estimation
Nair, Srijith
Lin, Michael
Ju, Peizhong
Talebi, Amirreza
Bentley, Elizabeth Serena
Liu, Jia
Machine Learning
Collaborative training methods like Federated Learning (FL) and Split Learning (SL) enable distributed machine learning without sharing raw data. However, FL assumes clients can train entire models, which is infeasible for large-scale models. In contrast, while SL alleviates the client memory constraint in FL by offloading most training to the server, it increases network latency due to its sequential nature. Other methods address the conundrum by using local loss functions for parallel client-side training to improve efficiency, but they lack server feedback and potentially suffer poor accuracy. We propose FSL-SAGE (Federated Split Learning via Smashed Activation Gradient Estimation), a new federated split learning algorithm that estimates server-side gradient feedback via auxiliary models. These auxiliary models periodically adapt to emulate server behavior on local datasets. We show that FSL-SAGE achieves a convergence rate of $\mathcal{O}(1/\sqrt{T})$, where $T$ is the number of communication rounds. This result matches FedAvg, while significantly reducing communication costs and client memory requirements. Our empirical results also verify that it outperforms existing state-of-the-art FSL methods, offering both communication efficiency and accuracy.
title FSL-SAGE: Accelerating Federated Split Learning via Smashed Activation Gradient Estimation
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.23182