arXiv Machine Learning

ParaBlock: Communication-Computation Parallel Block Coordinate Federated Learning for Large Language Models

arXiv:2511. 19959v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Federated learning (FL) has been extensively studied as a privacy-preserving training paradigm.

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
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
Aug 17

Federated Prompt Learning: A Unified Framework, Empirical Analysis, and Future Directions

arXiv:2608. 13844v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have become core components of cloud-based intelligent services in academia and industry, yet their training and deployment are hindered by high computational costs, data centralization, and privacy concerns.

By Qinglin Yang, Chen Qiu, Hongyuan Zhang, Pengdeng Li, Yuan Liu, Zhihong Tian
arXiv Machine Learning
1d ago

FedFit: Federated Fine-Tuning of LLMs via Vector-Bank Parameterization and Quantization

FedFit introduces a federated fine‑tuning framework for large language models that reduces communication overhead by using a disjoint shared vector‑bank parameterization to reconstruct adapter matrices from two compact global vector banks. It resolves the aggregation dilemma between Sum‑of‑Products and Product‑of‑Sums through an alternating optimization schedule that alternates between accurate single‑bank updates and joint updates corrected by a Residual Spectral Aggregation mechanism. The method also incorporates blockwise quantization with client‑side error feedback and provides theoretical convergence guarantees, achieving perplexity comparable to standard federated LoRA while delivering up to 100× higher compression ratios on Qwen2.5 models.

By Hang Zou, Chao Zhang, Yuzhi Yang, Yu Tian, Samson Lasaulce, M\'erouane Debbah
arXiv Machine Learning
1d ago

Latent Information Sharing for Accelerating Federated Learning

The paper introduces a latent information sharing scheme for federated learning that mitigates client drift by sharing a small amount of hidden‑layer activations. The authors demonstrate both theoretically and empirically that this approach improves training efficiency while maintaining convergence guarantees and data privacy. Compared to existing methods such as FedProx, SCAFFOLD, FedPVR, FedProto, and SplitFed, the proposed method achieves higher model accuracy within a fixed round budget without adding significant communication overhead.

By Seungjun Lee, Ensieh Khazaei, Dimitrios Hatzinakos, Baturalp Buyukates, Sunwoo Lee
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
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