\textit{Split Federated Learning} (SFL) enables distributed model training by splitting networks between the server and clients. However, under client heterogeneity, the conventional static split strategy may be suboptimal because clients can differ in data distributions, adaptation dynamics, and representation learning progress, making a single split point insufficient to accommodate client-specific training states. In this paper, we propose \textsc{FedSGA}, a \textbf{S}ufficiency-\textbf{G}uided \textbf{A}daptive split \textbf{Fed}erated learning framework that addresses this question through client-specific shallow sufficiency estimation. First, we introduce a client-specific adaptation channel based on private prompt tokens, which tracks local adaptation dynamics separately from the shared backbone and provides a lightweight signal for detecting whether client adaptation remains active. To further avoid repeated online probing over multiple candidate depths, we design a shallow sufficiency estimator that combines cross-client semantic alignment, temporal interface stability, and prompt-state variation to estimate whether the shallowest split is already sufficient. Finally, we introduce a split-compatible interface harmonization module that projects activations from different split depths into a shared semantic space, improving the comparability of heterogeneous client interfaces before server-side prediction. Extensive experiments on multiple heterogeneous benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of \textsc{FedSGA} in improving model performance compared with state-of-the-art methods while reducing unnecessary client-side computation.
Wenhao Yuan, Chenchen Lin, Wentao Hu et al.· 0 citations
The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has increased demand for scalable and cost-effective deployment, especially for mobile and edge devices. Cloud-hosted LLMs are powerful but expensive and difficult to scale due to vendor lock-in and high resource needs, resulting in high expenses and unstable performance under load. Recent efforts focus on deploying small language models (SLMs), distilled or pruned from LLMs, on resource-constrained edge devices to reduce costs and improve scalability. However, edge-based SLMs face limited knowledge coverage and notable accuracy gap compared to cloud-based LLMs. To address this, we present DEFRAG, a decentralized edge collaboration system for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) that optimizes both retrieval and generation across heterogeneous edge devices. For retrieval, DEFRAG compresses and shares knowledge graphs, using hybrid retrieval to expand knowledge coverage. For generation, DEFRAG introduces an optimizer that adaptively selects SLMs and RAG parameters per query, balancing accuracy and cost. We implement DEFRAG on a heterogeneous edge testbed and evaluate it on benchmark QA datasets. We also test it under mobile route stress, non-uniform data placement, and a domain-specific QA workload. The results show that DEFRAG maintains stable service quality and cost efficiency under these broader settings. Results show that DEFRAG narrows the SLM-LLM accuracy gap, while reducing cost by up to 98.4% and increasing peak throughput by up to 97.8% over centralized services. These findings demonstrate the potential of DEFRAG for democratized LLM services at the edge.
Jiaxing Li, Hengzhi Wang, Feng Wang et al.· IEEE Transactions on Mobile...· 0 citations