# Federated Split GANs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.01750 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01750/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Jul 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.05629/) (2016)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Advances and Open Problems in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04977/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning with Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06434/) (2015)
- [SplitFed: When Federated Learning Meets Split Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12088/) (2020)
- [C-RNN-GAN: Continuous recurrent neural networks with adversarial training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09904/) (2016)
- [A Survey on Generative Adversarial Networks: Variants, Applications, and Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05132/) (2020)
- [FedGAN: Federated Generative Adversarial Networks for Distributed Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07228/) (2020)
- [Adversarial Ranking for Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.11001/) (2017)
- [MD-GAN: Multi-Discriminator Generative Adversarial Networks for Distributed Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.03850/) (2018)
- [Voice Conversion from Unaligned Corpora using Variational Autoencoding Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00849/) (2017)
- [PPGAN: Privacy-preserving Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.02007/) (2019)
- [FedSL: Federated Split Learning on Distributed Sequential Data in Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.03180/) (2020)
- [Multi-modal AsynDGAN: Learn From Distributed Medical Image Data without Sharing Private Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.08604/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [CollaFuse: Collaborative Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14429/) (2024)
- [A Distributed Generative AI Approach for Heterogeneous Multi-Domain Environments under Data Sharing constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.12979/) (2025)
- [Oops!... They Stole it Again: Attacks on Split Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10598/) (2025)
- [Privacy-Preserving Adaptive Re-Identification without Image Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12589/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Mobile devices and the immense amount and variety of data they generate are key enablers of machine learning (ML)-based applications. Traditional ML techniques have shifted toward new paradigms such as federated (FL) and split learning (SL) to improve the protection of user's data privacy. However, these paradigms often rely on server(s) located in the edge or cloud to train computationally-heavy parts of a ML model to avoid draining the limited resource on client devices, resulting in exposing device data to such third parties. This work proposes an alternative approach to train computationally-heavy ML models in user's devices themselves, where corresponding device data resides. Specifically, we focus on GANs (generative adversarial networks) and leverage their inherent privacy-preserving attribute. We train the discriminative part of a GAN with raw data on user's devices, whereas the generative model is trained remotely (e.g., server) for which there is no need to access sensor true data. Moreover, our approach ensures that the computational load of training the discriminative model is shared among user's devices-proportional to their computation capabilities-by means of SL. We implement our proposed collaborative training scheme of a computationally-heavy GAN model in real resource-constrained devices. The results show that our system preserves data privacy, keeps a short training time, and yields same accuracy of model training in unconstrained devices (e.g., cloud). Our code can be found on https://github.com/YukariSonz/FSL-GAN