Breaking the Memory Wall for Heterogeneous Federated Learning via Model Splitting
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Abstract (arXiv)
Federated Learning (FL) enables multiple devices to collaboratively train a shared model while preserving data privacy. Ever-increasing model complexity coupled with limited memory resources on the participating devices severely bottlenecks the deployment of FL in real-world scenarios. Thus, a framework that can effectively break the memory wall while jointly taking into account the hardware and statistical heterogeneity in FL is urgently required. In this paper, we propose SmartSplit, a framework that effectively reduces the memory footprint on the device side while guaranteeing the training progress and model accuracy for heterogeneous FL through model splitting.Towards this end, SmartSplit employs a hierarchical structure to adaptively guide the overall training process. In each training round, the central manager, hosted on the server, dynamically selects the participating devices and sets the cutting layer by jointly considering the memory budget, training capacity, and data distribution of each device. The MEC manager, deployed within the edge server, proceeds to split the local model and perform training of the server-side portion. Meanwhile, it fine-tunes the splitting points based on the time-evolving statistical importance. The on-device manager, embedded inside each mobile device, continuously monitors the local training status while employing cost-aware checkpointing to match the runtime dynamic memory budget. Extensive experiments on representative datasets are conducted on both commercial off-the-shelf mobile device testbeds. The experimental results show that SmartSplit excels in FL training on highly memory-constrained mobile SoCs, offering up to a 94% peak latency reduction and 100-fold memory savings. It enhances accuracy performance by 1.49%-57.18% and adaptively adjusts to dynamic memory budgets through cost-aware recomputation.
Key facts. Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 37 of its 75 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 12 Oct 2024.
Builds on
37 of 75 references.
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25 more
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Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2025: 2; 2026: 2.
4 papers.
- 2025Learning Like Humans: Resource-Efficient Federated Fine-Tuning through Cognitive Developmental Stagescited by 4
- 2026Floe: Federated Specialization for Real-Time LLM-SLM Inferencecited by 2
- 2025Ampere: Communication-Efficient and High-Accuracy Split Federated Learningcited by 1
- 2026When Is Shallow Enough? Adaptive Split Federated Learning with Client-Specific Sufficiency Estimationcited by 0
- 2026When Is Shallow Enough? Adaptive Split Federated Learning with Client-Specific Sufficiency Estimation16 Aug 2026
- 2026Floe: Federated Specialization for Real-Time LLM-SLM Inference15 Feb 2026
- 2025Learning Like Humans: Resource-Efficient Federated Fine-Tuning through Cognitive Developmental Stages31 Jul 2025
- 2025Ampere: Communication-Efficient and High-Accuracy Split Federated Learning8 Jul 2025