Adaptive LoRA Experts Allocation and Selection for Federated Fine-Tuning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Wang, Lei, Bian, Jieming, Zhang, Letian, Xu, Jie
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Wang, Lei
Bian, Jieming
Zhang, Letian
Xu, Jie
author_facet Wang, Lei
Bian, Jieming
Zhang, Letian
Xu, Jie
contents Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across various tasks, but fine-tuning them for domain-specific applications often requires substantial domain-specific data that may be distributed across multiple organizations. Federated Learning (FL) offers a privacy-preserving solution, but faces challenges with computational constraints when applied to LLMs. Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has emerged as a parameter-efficient fine-tuning approach, though a single LoRA module often struggles with heterogeneous data across diverse domains. This paper addresses two critical challenges in federated LoRA fine-tuning: 1. determining the optimal number and allocation of LoRA experts across heterogeneous clients, and 2. enabling clients to selectively utilize these experts based on their specific data characteristics. We propose FedLEASE (Federated adaptive LoRA Expert Allocation and SElection), a novel framework that adaptively clusters clients based on representation similarity to allocate and train domain-specific LoRA experts. It also introduces an adaptive top-$M$ Mixture-of-Experts mechanism that allows each client to select the optimal number of utilized experts. Our extensive experiments on diverse benchmark datasets demonstrate that FedLEASE significantly outperforms existing federated fine-tuning approaches in heterogeneous client settings while maintaining communication efficiency.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_15087
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Adaptive LoRA Experts Allocation and Selection for Federated Fine-Tuning
Wang, Lei
Bian, Jieming
Zhang, Letian
Xu, Jie
Machine Learning
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across various tasks, but fine-tuning them for domain-specific applications often requires substantial domain-specific data that may be distributed across multiple organizations. Federated Learning (FL) offers a privacy-preserving solution, but faces challenges with computational constraints when applied to LLMs. Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has emerged as a parameter-efficient fine-tuning approach, though a single LoRA module often struggles with heterogeneous data across diverse domains. This paper addresses two critical challenges in federated LoRA fine-tuning: 1. determining the optimal number and allocation of LoRA experts across heterogeneous clients, and 2. enabling clients to selectively utilize these experts based on their specific data characteristics. We propose FedLEASE (Federated adaptive LoRA Expert Allocation and SElection), a novel framework that adaptively clusters clients based on representation similarity to allocate and train domain-specific LoRA experts. It also introduces an adaptive top-$M$ Mixture-of-Experts mechanism that allows each client to select the optimal number of utilized experts. Our extensive experiments on diverse benchmark datasets demonstrate that FedLEASE significantly outperforms existing federated fine-tuning approaches in heterogeneous client settings while maintaining communication efficiency.
title Adaptive LoRA Experts Allocation and Selection for Federated Fine-Tuning
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15087