Optimizing Multilingual LLMs via Federated Learning: A Study of Client Language Composition

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Sant, Aleix, Luque, Jordi, Escolano, Carlos
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Sant, Aleix
Luque, Jordi
Escolano, Carlos
author_facet Sant, Aleix
Luque, Jordi
Escolano, Carlos
contents Federated Learning (FL) of Large Language Models (LLMs) in multilingual environments presents significant challenges stemming from heterogeneous language distributions across clients and disparities in language resource availability. To address these challenges, we extended the FederatedScope-LLM framework to support multilingual instruction-tuning experiments with LLMs. We also introduced a novel client-specific early stopping mechanism, Local Dynamic Early Stopping (LDES-FL), which allows clients to pause and resume local training based on client-side validation performance, enhancing training efficiency and sustainability. Through a series of experiments, we studied how client language composition - from fully monolingual to increasingly multilingual clients - affects multilingual quality, fairness and training cost. Monolingual local fine-tuning remains the most effective for single-language specialization, whereas federated training is better suited to learning a single balanced multilingual model. In FL, increasing within-client multilinguality leads to stronger and fairer global models, narrows the gap to centralized multilingual fine-tuning, and yields the largest gains for lower-resource languages, albeit at the cost of more optimization steps. Overall, our results identify client language composition as a key design variable in multilingual FL, shaping performance, fairness and efficiency.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_24242
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Optimizing Multilingual LLMs via Federated Learning: A Study of Client Language Composition
Sant, Aleix
Luque, Jordi
Escolano, Carlos
Computation and Language
Federated Learning (FL) of Large Language Models (LLMs) in multilingual environments presents significant challenges stemming from heterogeneous language distributions across clients and disparities in language resource availability. To address these challenges, we extended the FederatedScope-LLM framework to support multilingual instruction-tuning experiments with LLMs. We also introduced a novel client-specific early stopping mechanism, Local Dynamic Early Stopping (LDES-FL), which allows clients to pause and resume local training based on client-side validation performance, enhancing training efficiency and sustainability. Through a series of experiments, we studied how client language composition - from fully monolingual to increasingly multilingual clients - affects multilingual quality, fairness and training cost. Monolingual local fine-tuning remains the most effective for single-language specialization, whereas federated training is better suited to learning a single balanced multilingual model. In FL, increasing within-client multilinguality leads to stronger and fairer global models, narrows the gap to centralized multilingual fine-tuning, and yields the largest gains for lower-resource languages, albeit at the cost of more optimization steps. Overall, our results identify client language composition as a key design variable in multilingual FL, shaping performance, fairness and efficiency.
title Optimizing Multilingual LLMs via Federated Learning: A Study of Client Language Composition
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.24242