Ampere: Communication-Efficient and High-Accuracy Split Federated Learning

A Federated Learning (FL) system collaboratively trains neural networks across devices and a server but is limited by significant on-device computation costs. Split Federated Learning (SFL) systems mitigate this by offloading a block of layers of the network from the device to a server. However, in doing so, it introduces large communication overheads due to frequent exchanges of intermediate activations and gradients between devices and the server and reduces model accuracy for non-IID data. We propose Ampere, a novel collaborative training system that simultaneously minimizes on-device computation and device-server communication while improving model accuracy. Unlike SFL, which uses a global loss by iterative end-to-end training, Ampere develops unidirectional inter-block training to sequentially train the device and server blocks with a local loss, eliminating the transfer of gradients. A lightweight auxiliary network generation method decouples training between the device and server, reducing frequent intermediate exchanges to a single transfer, which significantly reduces the communication overhead. Ampere mitigates the impact of data heterogeneity by consolidating activations generated by the trained device block to train the server block, in contrast to SFL, which trains on device-specific, non-IID activations. Extensive experiments on multiple CNNs and Transformers show that, compared to state-of-the-art SFL baseline systems, Ampere (i) improves model accuracy by up to 11.70 percentage points while training up to 18.6x faster, (ii) incurs up to 911x lower device-server communication overhead and up to 14.5x lower on-device computation, and (iii) reduces standard deviation of accuracy by 71.13% for various non-IID degrees highlighting superior performance when faced with heterogeneous data. Ampere is available from https://github.com/blessonvar/Ampere.