FedSVD: Adaptive Orthogonalization for Private Federated Learning with LoRA

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Lee, Seanie, Park, Sangwoo, Lee, Dong Bok, Wagner, Dominik, Seong, Haebin, Bocklet, Tobias, Lee, Juho, Hwang, Sung Ju
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Lee, Seanie
Park, Sangwoo
Lee, Dong Bok
Wagner, Dominik
Seong, Haebin
Bocklet, Tobias
Lee, Juho
Hwang, Sung Ju
author_facet Lee, Seanie
Park, Sangwoo
Lee, Dong Bok
Wagner, Dominik
Seong, Haebin
Bocklet, Tobias
Lee, Juho
Hwang, Sung Ju
contents Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), which introduces a product of two trainable low-rank matrices into frozen pre-trained weights, is widely used for efficient fine-tuning of language models in federated learning (FL). However, when combined with differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD), LoRA faces substantial noise amplification: DP-SGD perturbs per-sample gradients, and the matrix multiplication of the LoRA update ($BA$) intensifies this effect. Freezing one matrix (e.g., $A$) reduces the noise but restricts model expressiveness, often resulting in suboptimal adaptation. To address this, we propose $\texttt{FedSVD}$, a simple yet effective method that introduces a global reparameterization based on singular value decomposition (SVD). In our approach, each client optimizes only the $B$ matrix and transmits it to the server. The server aggregates the $B$ matrices, computes the product $BA$ using the previous $A$, and refactorizes the result via SVD. This yields a new adaptive $A$ composed of the orthonormal right singular vectors of $BA$, and an updated $B$ containing the remaining SVD components. This reparameterization avoids quadratic noise amplification, while allowing $A$ to better capture the principal directions of the aggregate updates. Moreover, the orthonormal structure of $A$ bounds the gradient norms of $B$ and preserves more signal under DP-SGD, as confirmed by our theoretical analysis. As a result, $\texttt{FedSVD}$ consistently improves stability and performance across a variety of privacy settings and benchmarks, outperforming relevant baselines under both private and non-private regimes.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_12805
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle FedSVD: Adaptive Orthogonalization for Private Federated Learning with LoRA
Lee, Seanie
Park, Sangwoo
Lee, Dong Bok
Wagner, Dominik
Seong, Haebin
Bocklet, Tobias
Lee, Juho
Hwang, Sung Ju
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), which introduces a product of two trainable low-rank matrices into frozen pre-trained weights, is widely used for efficient fine-tuning of language models in federated learning (FL). However, when combined with differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD), LoRA faces substantial noise amplification: DP-SGD perturbs per-sample gradients, and the matrix multiplication of the LoRA update ($BA$) intensifies this effect. Freezing one matrix (e.g., $A$) reduces the noise but restricts model expressiveness, often resulting in suboptimal adaptation. To address this, we propose $\texttt{FedSVD}$, a simple yet effective method that introduces a global reparameterization based on singular value decomposition (SVD). In our approach, each client optimizes only the $B$ matrix and transmits it to the server. The server aggregates the $B$ matrices, computes the product $BA$ using the previous $A$, and refactorizes the result via SVD. This yields a new adaptive $A$ composed of the orthonormal right singular vectors of $BA$, and an updated $B$ containing the remaining SVD components. This reparameterization avoids quadratic noise amplification, while allowing $A$ to better capture the principal directions of the aggregate updates. Moreover, the orthonormal structure of $A$ bounds the gradient norms of $B$ and preserves more signal under DP-SGD, as confirmed by our theoretical analysis. As a result, $\texttt{FedSVD}$ consistently improves stability and performance across a variety of privacy settings and benchmarks, outperforming relevant baselines under both private and non-private regimes.
title FedSVD: Adaptive Orthogonalization for Private Federated Learning with LoRA
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.12805