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.
By Mohamed Aboelenien Ahmed, Kilian Pfeiffer, Ramin Khalili, Heba Khdr, J\"org Henkel
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
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:2606. 03209v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) in privacy-sensitive and resource-constrained environments remains challenging.
By Yunsheng Yuan, Shaowei Li, Kai Wang, Zhongyuan Sun, Zheng Zhang, Kai Han, Jun Luo, Feng Li
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:2310. 16152v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Federated learning (FL) has become a key component in various language modeling applications such as machine translation, next-word prediction, and medical record analysis.
By Md Rafi Ur Rashid, Vishnu Asutosh Dasu, Kang Gu, Najrin Sultana, Shagufta Mehnaz
arXiv:2606. 16891v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Federated Learning is rapidly evolving beyond the exchange of traditional model weights and gradients, yet existing definitions fail to capture the full scope of modern payloads like synthetic data and federated analytics.
By Alvaro Javier Vargas Guerrero, Xinguang Wang, Quang Manh Doan, Guy Nagels
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
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
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:2508. 15706v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Communication-efficient distributed training algorithms (e.
By Amir Sarfi, Benjamin Th\'erien, Joel Lidin, Eugene Belilovsky
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