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