Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Yao, Kai, Tan, Zhaorui, Gao, Penglei, Li, Lichun, Wu, Kaixin, Wang, Yinggui, Zhao, Yuan, Ji, Yixin, Wang, Wei, Zhu, Jianke
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.04455
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Table of Contents:
  • The rapid growth of large language models (LLMs) with traditional centralized fine-tuning emerges as a key technique for adapting these models to domain-specific challenges, yielding privacy risks for both model and data owners. One promising solution, called offsite-tuning (OT), is proposed to address these challenges, where a weaker emulator is compressed from the original model and further fine-tuned with adapter to enhance privacy. However, the existing OT-based methods require high computational costs and lack theoretical analysis. This paper introduces a novel OT approach based on gradient-preserving compression, named GradOT. By analyzing the OT problem through the lens of optimization, we propose a method that selectively applies compression techniques such as rank compression and channel pruning, preserving the gradients of fine-tuned adapters while ensuring privacy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach surpasses existing OT methods, both in terms of privacy protection and model performance. Our method provides a theoretical foundation for OT and offers a practical, training-free solution for offsite-tuning of large-scale LLMs.