Federated Learning with Layer Skipping: Efficient Training of Large Language Models for Healthcare NLP

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Hauptverfasser: Zhang, Lihong, Li, Yue
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Zhang, Lihong
Li, Yue
author_facet Zhang, Lihong
Li, Yue
contents Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative model training across organizations without sharing raw data, addressing crucial privacy concerns in healthcare natural language processing (NLP). However, training large language models (LLMs) in federated settings faces significant challenges, including communication overhead and data heterogeneity. We propose Layer-Skipping Federated Learning, where only selected layers of a pre-trained LLM are fine-tuned across clients while others remain frozen. Applied to LLaMA 3.2-1B, our approach reduces communication costs by approximately 70% while maintaining performance within 2% of centralized training. We evaluate our method on clinical NER and classification tasks using i2b2 and MIMIC-III datasets. Our experiments demonstrate that Layer-Skipping FL outperforms competitive baselines, handles non-IID clinical data distributions effectively, and shows robustness when combined with differential privacy. This approach represents a practical solution for privacy-preserving collaborative learning in healthcare NLP.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_10536
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Federated Learning with Layer Skipping: Efficient Training of Large Language Models for Healthcare NLP
Zhang, Lihong
Li, Yue
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative model training across organizations without sharing raw data, addressing crucial privacy concerns in healthcare natural language processing (NLP). However, training large language models (LLMs) in federated settings faces significant challenges, including communication overhead and data heterogeneity. We propose Layer-Skipping Federated Learning, where only selected layers of a pre-trained LLM are fine-tuned across clients while others remain frozen. Applied to LLaMA 3.2-1B, our approach reduces communication costs by approximately 70% while maintaining performance within 2% of centralized training. We evaluate our method on clinical NER and classification tasks using i2b2 and MIMIC-III datasets. Our experiments demonstrate that Layer-Skipping FL outperforms competitive baselines, handles non-IID clinical data distributions effectively, and shows robustness when combined with differential privacy. This approach represents a practical solution for privacy-preserving collaborative learning in healthcare NLP.
title Federated Learning with Layer Skipping: Efficient Training of Large Language Models for Healthcare NLP
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.10536