arXiv AI

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.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

Tackling Feature-Classifier Mismatch in Federated Learning via Prompt-Driven Feature Transformation

The paper introduces FedPFT, a federated learning framework that tackles the feature‑classifier mismatch problem by using personalized prompts processed through a shared self‑attention transformation module. Unlike prior methods that either degrade the feature extractor or address the mismatch only after training, FedPFT aligns local features with the global classifier during training, improving aggregation and model performance. Experiments demonstrate that FedPFT surpasses state‑of‑the‑art methods by up to 5.07%, and gains up to 7.08% when combined with collaborative contrastive learning.

By Xinghao Wu, Xuefeng Liu, Jianwei Niu, Guogang Zhu, Mingjia Shi, Shaojie Tang, Jing Yuan
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 3

From Task Mixtures to Specialized Experts

The paper investigates federated learning where each client’s data consists of unknown mixtures of distinct tasks, a scenario termed compound heterogeneity. It shows that when tasks share a common feature geometry, the optimal model for a mixed client is a convex combination of task‑specific models, motivating input‑dependent routing to specialized experts. The authors propose FedSEE, a method that recovers task experts via a convex program and achieves better performance than baselines, reducing negative transfer by 2.9 points overall and 3.7 points for the worst‑served quartile.

By Hojat Allah Salehi, Mehrdad Mahdavi, Andrew Arash Mahyari, M. Hadi Amini
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 AI
Oct 16

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.

By Gwen Legate, Rahaf Aljundi, Eugene Belilovsky
arXiv Computer Vision
6d ago

FedRAPP: Federated Test-Time Prompt Tuning for Vision-Language Models with Reliability-Aware Prompt Personalization

FedRAPP introduces a personalized aggregation framework for federated test‑time prompt tuning of vision‑language models, enabling distributed clients to adapt soft prompts on unlabeled test streams without source data. The method incorporates reliability‑aware client assessment, server‑side exponential moving‑average prompt memory, and similarity‑guided peer aggregation to selectively combine information from reliable and compatible clients. Experiments on nine CLIP benchmark datasets and ImageNet variants show that FedRAPP consistently outperforms standard federated aggregation baselines under heterogeneous client distributions while preserving prompt‑only adaptation efficiency.

By Syed Md. Ahnaf Hasan, Md Akil Raihan Iftee, Sajib Mistry, Amin Ahsan Ali, AKM Mahbubur Rahman
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 31

Beyond Non-IID: Learner--Client Distribution Mismatch in Federated Learning

The paper addresses the mismatch between learner and client data distributions in federated learning, noting that traditional client selection methods often ignore this misalignment. It introduces a dynamic, influence-aware client selection framework that uses a small proxy dataset to estimate each client's utility for the learner’s objective, prioritizing informative sources while mitigating noise and heterogeneity. Experiments on CIFAR-10 with heterogeneous partitions show the proposed method outperforms static and dynamic baselines, achieving faster convergence and higher accuracy.

By Yiming Xie, Lili Su, Ningfang Mi
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