AFLoRA: Adaptive Federated Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models with Resource-Aware Low-Rank Adaption

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Zhou, Yajie, Pang, Xiaoyi, Wang, Zhibo
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Zhou, Yajie
Pang, Xiaoyi
Wang, Zhibo
author_facet Zhou, Yajie
Pang, Xiaoyi
Wang, Zhibo
contents Federated fine-tuning has emerged as a promising approach to adapt foundation models to downstream tasks using decentralized data. However, real-world deployment remains challenging due to the high computational and communication demands of fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) on clients with data and system resources that are heterogeneous and constrained. In such settings, the global model's performance is often bottlenecked by the weakest clients and further degraded by the non-IID nature of local data. Although existing methods leverage parameter-efficient techniques such as Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to reduce communication and computation overhead, they often fail to simultaneously ensure accurate aggregation of low-rank updates and maintain low system costs, thereby hindering overall performance. To address these challenges, we propose AFLoRA, an adaptive and lightweight federated fine-tuning framework for LLMs. AFLoRA decouples shared and client-specific updates to reduce overhead and improve aggregation accuracy, incorporates diagonal matrix-based rank pruning to better utilize local resources, and employs rank-aware aggregation with public data refinement to strengthen generalization under data heterogeneity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AFLoRA outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both accuracy and efficiency, providing a practical solution for efficient LLM adaptation in heterogeneous environments in the real world.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_24773
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle AFLoRA: Adaptive Federated Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models with Resource-Aware Low-Rank Adaption
Zhou, Yajie
Pang, Xiaoyi
Wang, Zhibo
Machine Learning
Federated fine-tuning has emerged as a promising approach to adapt foundation models to downstream tasks using decentralized data. However, real-world deployment remains challenging due to the high computational and communication demands of fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) on clients with data and system resources that are heterogeneous and constrained. In such settings, the global model's performance is often bottlenecked by the weakest clients and further degraded by the non-IID nature of local data. Although existing methods leverage parameter-efficient techniques such as Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to reduce communication and computation overhead, they often fail to simultaneously ensure accurate aggregation of low-rank updates and maintain low system costs, thereby hindering overall performance. To address these challenges, we propose AFLoRA, an adaptive and lightweight federated fine-tuning framework for LLMs. AFLoRA decouples shared and client-specific updates to reduce overhead and improve aggregation accuracy, incorporates diagonal matrix-based rank pruning to better utilize local resources, and employs rank-aware aggregation with public data refinement to strengthen generalization under data heterogeneity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AFLoRA outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both accuracy and efficiency, providing a practical solution for efficient LLM adaptation in heterogeneous environments in the real world.
title AFLoRA: Adaptive Federated Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models with Resource-Aware Low-Rank Adaption
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.24773