arXiv AI

Optimal Hydra: Model Heterogeneous Federated Learning for LLMs using Data-Informed Hydra-Nets

Optimal Hydra is a transformer‑based heterogeneous federated learning framework designed for fine‑tuning large language models. It creates client‑specific sub‑networks, called Hydra‑nets, by selecting global layers and tailoring attention heads to each client’s local data distribution. Experiments on three datasets demonstrate significant performance gains over baseline methods while reducing local resource demands.

arXiv AI
Oct 9

Task-Centric Personalized Federated Fine-Tuning of Language Models

The paper introduces FedRouter, a personalized federated learning framework that clusters tasks rather than clients to build specialized language models. It employs local and global clustering of adapters to associate them with specific tasks and includes an evaluation router that directs test samples to the most suitable adapter. Experiments on a multitask dataset show FedRouter outperforms existing methods, achieving up to 6.1% relative improvement under task interference and 136% under generalization scenarios.

By Gabriel U. Talasso, Meghdad Kurmanji, Allan M. de Souza, Nicholas D. Lane, Leandro A. Villas
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 2

FlexP-SFT: A Flexible Aggregation-Free Framework for On-Device Personalized Split Federated Fine-Tuning of LLMs

FlexP-SFT introduces an aggregation-free framework for personalized split federated fine-tuning of large language models, eliminating the client-side aggregation step that traditionally causes communication bottlenecks and straggler issues. The method employs a layer‑flexible alignment strategy to balance personalization and generalization without global synchronization, and formulates split‑ratio selection as a resource‑aware discrete optimization problem. Experiments demonstrate that FlexP-SFT improves both accuracy and latency compared to baselines, achieving a superior resource‑accuracy trade‑off.

By Jiaxiang Geng, Tianjun Yuan, Pengchao Han, Ying Gao, Xianhao Chen, Bing Luo
arXiv AI
Sep 15

Task-Aware Federated Fine-Tuning for MoE-based Large Language Models

The paper introduces FedTAR, a task-aware federated fine‑tuning approach for Mixture‑of‑Experts (MoE) large language models. FedTAR links local client updates to task preferences using routing outputs and Singular Value Decomposition to extract low‑dimensional task coordinates and update directions. It then aggregates updates within and across task clusters, reconstructing the final update to preserve expert specialization and reduce interference, achieving state‑of‑the‑art performance on four benchmark tasks under non‑IID settings.

By Tingqi Wang, Hongyu Ke, Haoxin Wang, Rafal Angryk, Zhipeng Cai
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

Differentiated Aggregation to Improve Generalization in Federated Learning

The paper proposes a new federated learning approach called FedALS that reduces communication costs by varying aggregation frequencies across model layers. It derives tighter generalization bounds for one‑round and multi‑round federated learning, linking these bounds to local updates and data heterogeneity. Based on representation‑learning insights, the authors argue that infrequent aggregation of early layers and more frequent aggregation of final layers yields more generalizable models, especially in non‑iid settings, and demonstrate the method’s effectiveness experimentally.

By Peyman Gholami, Hulya Seferoglu
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 16

Conflict-Aware Federated Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models with Mixture-of-Experts

arXiv:2606. 15625v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The continuous scaling of large language models (LLMs) incurs prohibitive computational costs, making Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) a scalable alternative for efficient fine-tuning via sparse activation.

By Yijun Lu, Zihan Fang, Pengpeng Qiao, Zheng Lin, Jing Yang, Yuxin Zhang, Por Lip Yee, Zhe Chen, Jun Luo
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 3

FedSAP: Federated Learning with Structured Adaptive Partitioning for Multi-Domain Heterogeneous Edge Devices

FedSAP is a federated learning framework that addresses heterogeneous edge devices by using structured pruning as a budget-constrained tri-state channel allocation. It partitions model channels into a Global pool, pseudo-domain-specific Private pools, and a Dropped state, allowing broadly useful features to be shared while isolating domain-sensitive updates. Experiments on Digits and Office-Caltech datasets show FedSAP achieving higher mean global accuracy than the strongest baseline while supporting up to 80% client pruning ratios.

By Wentao Yue, Tianyou Lai, Hongji Li, Qingyu Mao, Qilei Li