CooperLLM: Cloud-Edge-End Cooperative Federated Fine-tuning for LLMs via ZOO-based Gradient Correction

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Hauptverfasser: Sun, He, Zhou, Jinrui, Li, Li, Xiao, Mingjun
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Sun, He
Zhou, Jinrui
Li, Li
Xiao, Mingjun
author_facet Sun, He
Zhou, Jinrui
Li, Li
Xiao, Mingjun
contents Large Language Models (LLMs) perform well on many NLP tasks, but fine-tuning them on resource-constrained mobile devices is challenging due to high memory and computation costs, despite growing demands for privacy-preserving personalization. Federated Learning (FL) enables local-data training, yet existing methods either rely on memory-intensive backpropagation or use zeroth-order optimization (ZOO), which avoids backward passes but suffers from slow convergence and degraded accuracy. We propose CooperLLM, a cloud-assisted edge-end cooperative federated fine-tuning framework that combines ZOO on mobile devices with cloud-guided gradient rectification. Mobile clients perform lightweight ZOO updates on private data, while the cloud fine-tunes on auxiliary public data using backpropagation and injects guided perturbations to rectify local updates, improving convergence and accuracy without violating privacy. To address system bottlenecks, CooperLLM introduces pipeline scheduling and adaptive compression to overlap computation and communication and reduce memory usage. Experiments on multiple Transformer models and datasets show that CooperLLM reduces on-device memory by up to $86.4\%$, accelerates convergence by $8.8 \times$, and improves accuracy by up to 10 percentage points over state-of-the-art ZOO-based baselines.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_12917
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CooperLLM: Cloud-Edge-End Cooperative Federated Fine-tuning for LLMs via ZOO-based Gradient Correction
Sun, He
Zhou, Jinrui
Li, Li
Xiao, Mingjun
Machine Learning
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
F.2.2; I.2.7
Large Language Models (LLMs) perform well on many NLP tasks, but fine-tuning them on resource-constrained mobile devices is challenging due to high memory and computation costs, despite growing demands for privacy-preserving personalization. Federated Learning (FL) enables local-data training, yet existing methods either rely on memory-intensive backpropagation or use zeroth-order optimization (ZOO), which avoids backward passes but suffers from slow convergence and degraded accuracy. We propose CooperLLM, a cloud-assisted edge-end cooperative federated fine-tuning framework that combines ZOO on mobile devices with cloud-guided gradient rectification. Mobile clients perform lightweight ZOO updates on private data, while the cloud fine-tunes on auxiliary public data using backpropagation and injects guided perturbations to rectify local updates, improving convergence and accuracy without violating privacy. To address system bottlenecks, CooperLLM introduces pipeline scheduling and adaptive compression to overlap computation and communication and reduce memory usage. Experiments on multiple Transformer models and datasets show that CooperLLM reduces on-device memory by up to $86.4\%$, accelerates convergence by $8.8 \times$, and improves accuracy by up to 10 percentage points over state-of-the-art ZOO-based baselines.
title CooperLLM: Cloud-Edge-End Cooperative Federated Fine-tuning for LLMs via ZOO-based Gradient Correction
topic Machine Learning
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
F.2.2; I.2.7
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.12917