FedSEA-LLaMA: A Secure, Efficient and Adaptive Federated Splitting Framework for Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhang, Zishuai, zhang, Hainan, Li, Weihua, zhang, Qinnan, Dong, jin, Tong, Yongxin, Zheng, Zhiming
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Zhang, Zishuai
zhang, Hainan
Li, Weihua
zhang, Qinnan
Dong, jin
Tong, Yongxin
Zheng, Zhiming
author_facet Zhang, Zishuai
zhang, Hainan
Li, Weihua
zhang, Qinnan
Dong, jin
Tong, Yongxin
Zheng, Zhiming
contents Private data holds promise for improving LLMs due to its high quality, but its scattered distribution across data silos and the high computational demands of LLMs limit their deployment in federated environments. To address this, the transformer-based federated split models are proposed, which offload most model parameters to the server (or distributed clients) while retaining only a small portion on the client to ensure data privacy. Despite this design, they still face three challenges: 1) Peer-to-peer key encryption struggles to secure transmitted vectors effectively; 2) The auto-regressive nature of LLMs means that federated split learning can only train and infer sequentially, causing high communication overhead; 3) Fixed partition points lack adaptability to downstream tasks. In this paper, we introduce FedSEA-LLaMA, a Secure, Efficient, and Adaptive Federated splitting framework based on LLaMA2. First, we inject Gaussian noise into forward-pass hidden states to enable secure end-to-end vector transmission. Second, we employ attention-mask compression and KV cache collaboration to reduce communication costs, accelerating training and inference. Third, we allow users to dynamically adjust the partition points for input/output blocks based on specific task requirements. Experiments on natural language understanding, summarization, and conversational QA tasks show that FedSEA-LLaMA maintains performance comparable to centralized LLaMA2 and achieves up to 8x speedups in training and inference. Further analysis of privacy attacks and different partition points also demonstrates the effectiveness of FedSEA-LLaMA in security and adaptability.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_15683
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle FedSEA-LLaMA: A Secure, Efficient and Adaptive Federated Splitting Framework for Large Language Models
Zhang, Zishuai
zhang, Hainan
Li, Weihua
zhang, Qinnan
Dong, jin
Tong, Yongxin
Zheng, Zhiming
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Private data holds promise for improving LLMs due to its high quality, but its scattered distribution across data silos and the high computational demands of LLMs limit their deployment in federated environments. To address this, the transformer-based federated split models are proposed, which offload most model parameters to the server (or distributed clients) while retaining only a small portion on the client to ensure data privacy. Despite this design, they still face three challenges: 1) Peer-to-peer key encryption struggles to secure transmitted vectors effectively; 2) The auto-regressive nature of LLMs means that federated split learning can only train and infer sequentially, causing high communication overhead; 3) Fixed partition points lack adaptability to downstream tasks. In this paper, we introduce FedSEA-LLaMA, a Secure, Efficient, and Adaptive Federated splitting framework based on LLaMA2. First, we inject Gaussian noise into forward-pass hidden states to enable secure end-to-end vector transmission. Second, we employ attention-mask compression and KV cache collaboration to reduce communication costs, accelerating training and inference. Third, we allow users to dynamically adjust the partition points for input/output blocks based on specific task requirements. Experiments on natural language understanding, summarization, and conversational QA tasks show that FedSEA-LLaMA maintains performance comparable to centralized LLaMA2 and achieves up to 8x speedups in training and inference. Further analysis of privacy attacks and different partition points also demonstrates the effectiveness of FedSEA-LLaMA in security and adaptability.
title FedSEA-LLaMA: A Secure, Efficient and Adaptive Federated Splitting Framework for Large Language Models
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.15683