Lightweight User-Personalization Method for Closed Split Computing

TL;DR

SALT is a lightweight, client-side adaptation framework for closed split computing systems that enhances personalization, robustness, and privacy without increasing communication overhead, demonstrated by significant accuracy improvements and reduced training costs.

Contribution

The paper introduces SALT, a novel lightweight client-side adapter that enables effective model adaptation in closed split computing environments without modifying core networks or increasing communication.

Findings

SALT improves personalized accuracy from 88.1% to 93.8%.

Reduces training latency by over 60%.

Maintains over 90% accuracy under packet loss and noise.

Abstract

Split Computing enables collaborative inference between edge devices and the cloud by partitioning a deep neural network into an edge-side head and a server-side tail, reducing latency and limiting exposure of raw input data. However, inference performance often degrades in practical deployments due to user-specific data distribution shifts, unreliable communication, and privacy-oriented perturbations, especially in closed environments where model architectures and parameters are inaccessible. To address this challenge, we propose SALT (Split-Adaptive Lightweight Tuning), a lightweight adaptation framework for closed Split Computing systems. SALT introduces a compact client-side adapter that refines intermediate representations produced by a frozen head network, enabling effective model adaptation without modifying the head or tail networks or increasing communication overhead. By modifying only the training conditions, SALT supports multiple adaptation objectives, including user personalization, communication robustness, and privacy-aware inference. Experiments using ResNet-18 on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 show that SALT achieves higher accuracy than conventional retraining and fine-tuning while significantly reducing training cost. On CIFAR-10, SALT improves personalized accuracy from 88.1% to 93.8% while reducing training latency by more than 60%. SALT also maintains over 90% accuracy under 75% packet loss and preserves high accuracy (about 88% at sigma = 1.0) under noise injection. These results demonstrate that SALT provides an efficient and practical adaptation framework for real-world Split Computing systems.