Model Pruning-enabled Federated Split Learning for Resource-constrained Devices in Artificial Intelligence Empowered Edge Computing Environment

Distributed Collaborative Machine Learning (DCML) has emerged in artificial intelligence-empowered edge computing environments, such as the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), to process tremendous data generated by smart devices. However, parallel DCML frameworks require resource-constrained devices to update the entire Deep Neural Network (DNN) models and are vulnerable to reconstruction attacks. Concurrently, the serial DCML frameworks suffer from training efficiency problems due to their serial training nature. In this paper, we propose a Model Pruning-enabled Federated Split Learning framework (MP-FSL) to reduce resource consumption with a secure and efficient training scheme. Specifically, MP-FSL compresses DNN models by adaptive channel pruning and splits each compressed model into two parts that are assigned to the client and the server. Meanwhile, MP-FSL adopts a novel aggregation algorithm to aggregate the pruned heterogeneous models. We implement MP-FSL with a real FL platform to evaluate its performance. The experimental results show that MP-FSL outperforms the state-of-the-art frameworks in model accuracy by up to 1.35%, while concurrently reducing storage and computational resource consumption by up to 32.2% and 26.73%, respectively. These results demonstrate that MP-FSL is a comprehensive solution to the challenges faced by DCML, with superior performance in both reduced resource consumption and enhanced model performance.