Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Chen, Xiang, Shi, Yuling, Lan, Qizhen, Qiu, Yuchao, Wang, Min, Gu, Xiaodong, Yan, Yanfu
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08870
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866918280726315008
author Chen, Xiang
Shi, Yuling
Lan, Qizhen
Qiu, Yuchao
Wang, Min
Gu, Xiaodong
Yan, Yanfu
author_facet Chen, Xiang
Shi, Yuling
Lan, Qizhen
Qiu, Yuchao
Wang, Min
Gu, Xiaodong
Yan, Yanfu
contents LLM agents are widely deployed in complex interactive tasks, yet privacy constraints often preclude centralized optimization and co-evolution across dynamic environments. Despite the demonstrated success of Federated Learning (FL) on static datasets, its effectiveness in open-ended, self-evolving agent systems remains largely unexplored. In such settings, the direct application of standard FL is particularly challenging, as heterogeneous tasks and sparse, trajectory-level reward signals give rise to severe gradient instability, which undermines the global optimization process. To bridge this gap, we propose Fed-SE, a Federated Self-Evolution framework for LLM agents that establishes a local evolution-global aggregation paradigm. Locally, agents employ parameter-efficient fine-tuning on filtered, high-return trajectories to achieve stable gradient updates. Globally, Fed-SE aggregates updates within a low-rank subspace, reducing communication cost across clients. Experiments across five heterogeneous environments demonstrate that Fed-SE improves average task success rates by 10\% over the state-of-the-art FedIT, validating its effectiveness in cross-environment knowledge transfer under privacy constraints.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_08870
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Fed-SE: Federated Self-Evolution for Privacy-Constrained Multi-Environment LLM Agents
Chen, Xiang
Shi, Yuling
Lan, Qizhen
Qiu, Yuchao
Wang, Min
Gu, Xiaodong
Yan, Yanfu
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
LLM agents are widely deployed in complex interactive tasks, yet privacy constraints often preclude centralized optimization and co-evolution across dynamic environments. Despite the demonstrated success of Federated Learning (FL) on static datasets, its effectiveness in open-ended, self-evolving agent systems remains largely unexplored. In such settings, the direct application of standard FL is particularly challenging, as heterogeneous tasks and sparse, trajectory-level reward signals give rise to severe gradient instability, which undermines the global optimization process. To bridge this gap, we propose Fed-SE, a Federated Self-Evolution framework for LLM agents that establishes a local evolution-global aggregation paradigm. Locally, agents employ parameter-efficient fine-tuning on filtered, high-return trajectories to achieve stable gradient updates. Globally, Fed-SE aggregates updates within a low-rank subspace, reducing communication cost across clients. Experiments across five heterogeneous environments demonstrate that Fed-SE improves average task success rates by 10\% over the state-of-the-art FedIT, validating its effectiveness in cross-environment knowledge transfer under privacy constraints.
title Fed-SE: Federated Self-Evolution for Privacy-Constrained Multi-Environment LLM Agents
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08870