ACL: Adaptive Edge-Cloud Collaborative Learning for Heterogeneous Devices With Unlabeled Local Data

Zhengyuan Zhang, Dong Zhao, Renhao Liu, Yuxing Yao, Xiangyu Li, Huadong Ma

Published: 2025, Last Modified: 01 Apr 2026IEEE Trans. Mob. Comput. 2025EveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY-SA 4.0
Abstract: Edge-cloud collaborative learning emerges as a promising paradigm for adapting pre-trained deep neural network (DNN) models to the ever-changing edge data environments and specific downstream tasks. However, the heterogeneity of edge devices and unlabeled local data hinder the effectiveness of existing collaborative learning approaches. To address the above issues, we propose ACL, a novel adaptive edge-cloud collaborative learning paradigm for heterogeneous devices with unlabeled local data. In ACL, we first use FedNAS, a neural architecture search algorithm designed for collaborative learning to generate a customized model on each participating device, and then a lightweight semi-supervised collaborative learning framework HSSCL is used to fine-tune the pre-trained DNN model. Compared with the SOTA collaborative learning approaches, ACL achieves significant accuracy improvement, averaging 31.5% for image classification and 15.5% for object detection. Furthermore, it reduces time overhead by 3.1-5.1× and memory overhead by 6.3-12.5×. We will release our models and tools.
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