arXiv Machine Learning

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.

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

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 AI
2d ago

Federated Agent Optimization

The paper introduces Federated Agent Optimization (FAO), a framework for enabling large language model agents to improve collaboratively while keeping raw data, trajectories, and private knowledge local. FAO treats agent capabilities—such as memory, tools, rewards, skills, and structured knowledge—as a multi‑objective optimization space that balances utility, privacy leakage, and communication cost. It outlines methods for abstracting, protecting, aggregating, and adapting private experience into transferable capabilities, and highlights key challenges and future research directions for trustworthy federated agent systems.

By Qiang Yang, Zhiqiang Kou, Xueyi Zhang, Dong-Dong Wu, Hanlin Gu, Jing Guo, Yang Liu, Di Jiang, Qian Xu
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
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 Machine Learning
Aug 20

Coordination on a Budget: Federated Active Learning with Few Labels

The paper introduces a federated active learning (FAL) approach that tackles data privacy and label scarcity by coordinating query selection across clients. In low-budget scenarios, it finds that homogeneous (IID) data actually requires stronger coordination to avoid redundant queries, while heterogeneous data naturally yields diversity—a reversal of the usual federated learning narrative. The authors propose a new framework that aligns client data in a shared embedding space via federated representation learning, enabling globally coordinated active selection while keeping annotations local, and demonstrate that this method outperforms existing FAL methods even with larger annotation budgets.

By Liam Mohr, Daphna Weinshall