USPLIT-VQA: U-Shaped Split Learning for Visual Question Answering with Contribution-Aware Weighted Aggregation

Abstract

Visual Question Answering (VQA) systems, jointly interpreting images and natural language queries, hold significant promise across many domains, yet the privacy-sensitive nature of user data creates a fundamental barrier. Centralized training requires access to all data, while federated learning requires each client to host the full model. We propose USPLIT-VQA, a U-shaped split learning framework for privacy-preserving VQA in which each client retains the initial layers and the classification head while the server hosts the computationally heavy intermediate layers, keeping raw inputs and labels on the client device. We further introduce Contribution-Aware Weighted Aggregation (CAWA), a gradientsimilarity-based client scoring mechanism designed to reduce the influence of malicious updates. Experiments on four VQA datasets (VQA-RAD, SLAKE, PathVQA, and VizWiz) with two backbones show accuracy gains over Federated Learning for the Custom model and reduced accuracy for BiomedCLIP under the evaluated fixed split, alongside client memory reductions of up to 5.8X and communication reductions of up to 10.8X. With one malicious client, CAWA reduces the attacker's influence by over 98%, while experiments at higher corruption levels identify its limitations. Reconstruction experiments further show lower inversion quality under the evaluated attacks.