PervasiveFL: Pervasive Federated Learning for Heterogeneous IoT Systems

Federated learning (FL) has been recognized as a promising collaborative on-device machine learning method in the design of Internet of Things (IoT) systems. However, most existing FL methods fail to deal with IoT applications that contain a variety of IoT devices equipped with different types of neural network (NN) models. This is because traditional FL methods assume that local models on devices should have the same architecture as the global model on cloud. To address this problem, we propose a novel framework named PervasiveFL that enables efficient and effective FL among heterogeneous IoT devices. Without modifying original local models, PervasiveFL installs one lightweight NN model named modellet on each device. By using the deep mutual learning (DML) and our entropy-based decision gating (EDG) method, modellets and local models can selectively learn from each other through soft labels using locally captured data. Meanwhile, since modellets are of the same architecture, the learned knowledge by modellets can be shared among devices in a traditional FL manner. In this way, PervasiveFL can be pervasively applied to any heterogeneous IoT system. Comprehensive experimental results on four well-known datasets show that PervasiveFL can not only pervasively enable FL among heterogeneous devices within a large-scale IoT system, but also significantly enhance the inference accuracy of heterogeneous IoT devices with low communication overhead.