MDLdroid: a ChainSGD-reduce approach to mobile deep learning for personal mobile sensing

Personal mobile sensing is fast permeating our daily lives to enable activity monitoring, healthcare and rehabilitation. Combined with deep learning, these applications have achieved significant success in recent years. Different from conventional cloud-based paradigms, running deep learning on devices offers several advantages including data privacy preservation and low-latency response for both model inference and update. Since data collection is costly in reality, Google's Federated Learning offers not only complete data privacy but also better model robustness based on data from multiple users. However, personal mobile sensing applications are mostly user-specific and highly affected by environment. As a result, continuous local changes may seriously affect the performance of a global model generated by Federated Learning. In addition, deploying Federated Learning on a local server, e.g., edge server, may quickly reach the bottleneck due to resource limitation. Towards pushing deep learning on devices, we present MDLdroid, a novel decentralized mobile deep learning framework to enable resource-aware on-device collaborative learning for personal mobile sensing applications. To address resource limitation, we propose a ChainSGD-reduce approach which includes a novel chain-directed Synchronous Stochastic Gradient Descent algorithm to effectively reduce overhead among multiple devices. We also design an agent-based multi-goal reinforcement learning mechanism to balance resources in a fair and efficient manner. Our evaluations show that our model training on off-the-shelf mobile devices achieves 2x to 3.5x faster than single-device training, and 1.5x faster on average than the existing master-slave approach.