arXiv AI

Efficient Zeroth-Order Federated Finetuning of Language Models on Resource-Constrained Devices

arXiv:2502. 10239v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) is a promising paradigm for finetuning Large Language Models (LLMs) across distributed data sources while preserving data privacy.

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

FLoKD: Adaptive Knowledge Distillation for Federated Low-Rank LLM over Wireless Networks

FLoKD is an adaptive knowledge‑distillation framework designed for federated fine‑tuning of low‑rank LLMs over wireless networks. It transmits intermediate LoRA activations instead of full parameters or token‑level logits, and uses transformer block importance scoring plus dataset selection to reduce communication. Experiments on WikiText‑103, PTB, and Dialog show a 50‑65% reduction in communication while maintaining competitive perplexity.

By Xinlu Zhang, Na Yan, Yang Su, Yansha Deng, Toktam Mahmoodi
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 AI
Jun 16

SDFLoRA: Selective Decoupled Federated LoRA for Privacy-preserving Fine-tuning with Heterogeneous Clients

arXiv:2601. 11219v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Federated learning (FL) for large language models (LLMs) has attracted increasing attention as a privacy-preserving approach for adapting models over distributed data, where parameter-efficient methods such as Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) are widely adopted to reduce communication and memory costs.

By Zhikang Shen, Jianrong Lu, Haiyuan Wan, Jianhai Chen
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 9

Federated Large Language Models: Current Progress and Future Directions

arXiv:2409. 15723v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models have achieved impressive performance across diverse applications, yet their training typically depends on centralized data collection, raising serious privacy and governance concerns.

By Yuhang Yao, Jianyi Zhang, Junda Wu, Chengkai Huang, Yu Xia, Tong Yu, Ruiyi Zhang, Sungchul Kim, Ryan Rossi, Ang Li, Lina Yao, Julian McAuley, Yiran Chen, Carlee Joe-Wong