arXiv Machine Learning

SeedFlood: A Step Toward Scalable Decentralized Fine-Tuning of LLMs

SeedFlood is a novel decentralized fine‑tuning method for large language models that scales to billions of parameters and hundreds of clients. It leverages the seed‑reconstructible structure of zeroth‑order gradients to reduce message sizes to near‑zero, enabling efficient flooding across the network. Experiments show SeedFlood outperforms standard zeroth‑order baselines in communication efficiency and generalization, and rivals first‑order gossip methods while incurring far less communication cost.

arXiv AI
Sep 2

RW-LoRA: Communication-Efficient Decentralized LoRA Fine-Tuning via Random Walks

RW-LoRA introduces a random‑walk approach to fine‑tune LoRA models in a decentralized setting, using a single model token that moves through the network and updates locally. This eliminates the need for global synchronization and reduces communication and computation costs compared to centralized or gossip‑based methods. The authors provide convergence guarantees for non‑convex objectives and demonstrate competitive performance on NLP tasks across various graph topologies.

By Xingran Chen, Rohit Bhagat, Ghadir Ayache, Rawad Bitar, Yanmin Gong, Salim El Rouayheb