Communication-Pipelined Split Federated Learning for Foundation Model Fine-Tuning in UAV Networks

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Hauptverfasser: Zhou, Zizhen, Liang, Ying-Chang, Cheng, Yanyu, Lim, Wei Yang Bryan
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Zhou, Zizhen
Liang, Ying-Chang
Cheng, Yanyu
Lim, Wei Yang Bryan
author_facet Zhou, Zizhen
Liang, Ying-Chang
Cheng, Yanyu
Lim, Wei Yang Bryan
contents Deploying foundation models (FMs) on uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) promises broad ``low-altitude economy'' applications. Split federated learning (SFL)-based fine-tuning leverages distributed data while keeping raw data local and reduces client-side burden by partitioning the model between client and server. However, the per-round training latency is dominated by stragglers. Training paradigms featuring parallel gradient transmission (GT) allocate dedicated portions of downlink communication resources to each client. They may leave resources idle and suffer from prolonged GT latency, especially in UAV networks, where the communication latency typically far exceeds the computation latency. To address this, we propose a sequential GT paradigm, where the server dedicates all downlink resources for the current GT. We further propose communication-pipelined SFL (CPSFL), characterized by downlink GT priority scheduling and intra-round asynchronous training. We investigate CPSFL-based LoRA fine-tuning of FMs in UAV networks and formulate an optimization problem to minimize a weighted sum of per-round training latency and worst-case client energy consumption by optimizing the split point selection (SPS) and the computing and communication resource allocation (CCRA) (the uplink bandwidth allocation and the server computing frequency allocation). To solve this problem, we develop an attention-based deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework, where the base station agent decides the split point and the CCRA in each round by leveraging previous round information, including UAV trajectories. Simulation results show that the proposed DRL-based CPSFL scheme outperforms the parallel GT benchmarks, the ablation variants, the fixed CCRA scheme, while approaching the best fixed-SPS scheme.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_15404
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Communication-Pipelined Split Federated Learning for Foundation Model Fine-Tuning in UAV Networks
Zhou, Zizhen
Liang, Ying-Chang
Cheng, Yanyu
Lim, Wei Yang Bryan
Information Theory
Deploying foundation models (FMs) on uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) promises broad ``low-altitude economy'' applications. Split federated learning (SFL)-based fine-tuning leverages distributed data while keeping raw data local and reduces client-side burden by partitioning the model between client and server. However, the per-round training latency is dominated by stragglers. Training paradigms featuring parallel gradient transmission (GT) allocate dedicated portions of downlink communication resources to each client. They may leave resources idle and suffer from prolonged GT latency, especially in UAV networks, where the communication latency typically far exceeds the computation latency. To address this, we propose a sequential GT paradigm, where the server dedicates all downlink resources for the current GT. We further propose communication-pipelined SFL (CPSFL), characterized by downlink GT priority scheduling and intra-round asynchronous training. We investigate CPSFL-based LoRA fine-tuning of FMs in UAV networks and formulate an optimization problem to minimize a weighted sum of per-round training latency and worst-case client energy consumption by optimizing the split point selection (SPS) and the computing and communication resource allocation (CCRA) (the uplink bandwidth allocation and the server computing frequency allocation). To solve this problem, we develop an attention-based deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework, where the base station agent decides the split point and the CCRA in each round by leveraging previous round information, including UAV trajectories. Simulation results show that the proposed DRL-based CPSFL scheme outperforms the parallel GT benchmarks, the ablation variants, the fixed CCRA scheme, while approaching the best fixed-SPS scheme.
title Communication-Pipelined Split Federated Learning for Foundation Model Fine-Tuning in UAV Networks
topic Information Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.15404