PC-MoE: Memory-Efficient and Privacy-Preserving Collaborative Training for Mixture-of-Experts LLMs

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhang, Ze Yu, Ding, Bolin, Low, Bryan Kian Hsiang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Zhang, Ze Yu
Ding, Bolin
Low, Bryan Kian Hsiang
author_facet Zhang, Ze Yu
Ding, Bolin
Low, Bryan Kian Hsiang
contents Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) has been gaining popularity due to its successful adaptation to large language models (LLMs). In this work, we introduce Privacy-preserving Collaborative Mixture-of-Experts (PC-MoE), which leverages the sparsity of the MoE architecture for memory-efficient decentralized collaborative LLM training, enabling multiple parties with limited GPU-memory and data resources to collectively train more capable LLMs than they could achieve individually. At the same time, this approach protects training data privacy of each participant by keeping training data, as well as parts of the forward pass signal and gradients locally within each party. By design, PC-MoE synergistically combines the strengths of distributed computation with strong confidentiality assurances. Unlike most privacy-preserving schemes, which pay for confidentiality with lower task accuracy, our framework breaks that trade-off: across seven popular LLM benchmarks, it almost matches (and sometimes exceeds) the performance and convergence rate of a fully centralized model, enjoys near 70% peak GPU RAM reduction, while being fully robust against reconstruction attacks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_02965
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle PC-MoE: Memory-Efficient and Privacy-Preserving Collaborative Training for Mixture-of-Experts LLMs
Zhang, Ze Yu
Ding, Bolin
Low, Bryan Kian Hsiang
Machine Learning
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) has been gaining popularity due to its successful adaptation to large language models (LLMs). In this work, we introduce Privacy-preserving Collaborative Mixture-of-Experts (PC-MoE), which leverages the sparsity of the MoE architecture for memory-efficient decentralized collaborative LLM training, enabling multiple parties with limited GPU-memory and data resources to collectively train more capable LLMs than they could achieve individually. At the same time, this approach protects training data privacy of each participant by keeping training data, as well as parts of the forward pass signal and gradients locally within each party. By design, PC-MoE synergistically combines the strengths of distributed computation with strong confidentiality assurances. Unlike most privacy-preserving schemes, which pay for confidentiality with lower task accuracy, our framework breaks that trade-off: across seven popular LLM benchmarks, it almost matches (and sometimes exceeds) the performance and convergence rate of a fully centralized model, enjoys near 70% peak GPU RAM reduction, while being fully robust against reconstruction attacks.
title PC-MoE: Memory-Efficient and Privacy-Preserving Collaborative Training for Mixture-of-Experts LLMs
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.02965