SemiSFL: Split Federated Learning on Unlabeled and Non-IID Data

Federated Learning (FL) has emerged to allow multiple clients to collaboratively train machine learning models on their private data at the network edge. However, training and deploying large-scale models on resource-constrained devices is challenging. Fortunately, Split Federated Learning (SFL) offers a feasible solution by alleviating the computation and/or communication burden on clients. However, existing SFL works often assume sufficient labeled data on clients, which is usually impractical. Besides, data non-IIDness poses another challenge to ensure efficient model training. To our best knowledge, the above two issues have not been simultaneously addressed in SFL. Herein, we propose a novel Semi-supervised SFL system, termed SemiSFL, which incorporates clustering regularization to perform SFL with unlabeled and non-IID client data. Moreover, our theoretical and experimental investigations into model convergence reveal that the inconsistent training processes on labeled and unlabeled data have an influence on the effectiveness of clustering regularization. To mitigate the training inconsistency, we develop an algorithm for dynamically adjusting the global updating frequency, so as to improve training performance. Extensive experiments on benchmark models and datasets show that our system provides a 3.8x speed-up in training time, reduces the communication cost by about 70.3% while reaching the target accuracy, and achieves up to 5.8% improvement in accuracy under non-IID scenarios compared to the state-of-the-art baselines.