Beyond End-to-End: Dynamic Chain Optimization for Private LLM Adaptation on the Edge

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Wu, Yebo, Li, Jingguang, Tian, Chunlin, Tam, Kahou, Guo, Zhijiang, Li, Li
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Wu, Yebo
Li, Jingguang
Tian, Chunlin
Tam, Kahou
Guo, Zhijiang
Li, Li
author_facet Wu, Yebo
Li, Jingguang
Tian, Chunlin
Tam, Kahou
Guo, Zhijiang
Li, Li
contents Federated fine-tuning enables privacy-preserving LLM adaptation but faces a critical bottleneck: the disparity between LLMs' high memory demands and edge devices' limited capacity. To break the memory barrier, we propose Chain Federated Fine-Tuning (ChainFed), an innovative paradigm that forgoes end-to-end updates in favor of a sequential, layer-by-layer manner. It first trains the initial adapter to convergence, freezes its weights, and then proceeds to the next. This iterative train-and-freeze process forms an optimization chain, gradually enhancing the model's task-specific proficiency. ChainFed further integrates three core techniques: 1) Dynamic Layer Co-Tuning to bridge semantic gaps between sequentially tuned layers and facilitate information flow; 2) Globally Perceptive Optimization to endow each adapter with foresight beyond its local objective; 3) Function-Oriented Adaptive Tuning to automatically identify the optimal fine-tuning starting point. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of ChainFed over existing methods, boosting average accuracy by up to 46.46\%.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_06819
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Beyond End-to-End: Dynamic Chain Optimization for Private LLM Adaptation on the Edge
Wu, Yebo
Li, Jingguang
Tian, Chunlin
Tam, Kahou
Guo, Zhijiang
Li, Li
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Federated fine-tuning enables privacy-preserving LLM adaptation but faces a critical bottleneck: the disparity between LLMs' high memory demands and edge devices' limited capacity. To break the memory barrier, we propose Chain Federated Fine-Tuning (ChainFed), an innovative paradigm that forgoes end-to-end updates in favor of a sequential, layer-by-layer manner. It first trains the initial adapter to convergence, freezes its weights, and then proceeds to the next. This iterative train-and-freeze process forms an optimization chain, gradually enhancing the model's task-specific proficiency. ChainFed further integrates three core techniques: 1) Dynamic Layer Co-Tuning to bridge semantic gaps between sequentially tuned layers and facilitate information flow; 2) Globally Perceptive Optimization to endow each adapter with foresight beyond its local objective; 3) Function-Oriented Adaptive Tuning to automatically identify the optimal fine-tuning starting point. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of ChainFed over existing methods, boosting average accuracy by up to 46.46\%.
title Beyond End-to-End: Dynamic Chain Optimization for Private LLM Adaptation on the Edge
topic Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.06819