SplitFT: An Adaptive Federated Split Learning System For LLMs Fine-Tuning

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Shan, Yimeng, Zhang, Zhaorui, Di, Sheng, Liu, Yu, Lu, Xiaoyi, Liu, Benben
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Shan, Yimeng
Zhang, Zhaorui
Di, Sheng
Liu, Yu
Lu, Xiaoyi
Liu, Benben
author_facet Shan, Yimeng
Zhang, Zhaorui
Di, Sheng
Liu, Yu
Lu, Xiaoyi
Liu, Benben
contents Federated Split Learning has been identified as an efficient approach to address the computational resource constraints of clients in classical federated learning, while guaranteeing data privacy for distributed model training across data owners. However, it faces some critical challenges when such a training strategy meets large language models (LLMs) for fine-tuning. Such challenges include setting the cutlayer adaptively across different clients to address the data and device heterogeneity issues, which affect the system performance significantly. In addition, efficiently reducing the communication overhead during the fine-tuning procedure is also another challenge. No work tries to address these challenges. To bridge this gap, we propose SplitTF, an adaptive federated split learning system for LLMs fine-tuning. SplitFT enables different clients to set different cut layers according to their computation resources and trained model performance. SplitFT also proposes to reduce the LoRA rank in cutlayer to reduce the communication overhead. In addition to simulating the heterogeneous data in real-world applications for our proposed split federated learning system, we propose a length-based Dirichlet approach to divide the training data into different clients. Extensive experimental results show that our proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art approach for fine-tuning time efficiency and model performance based on various popular benchmarks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_26388
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SplitFT: An Adaptive Federated Split Learning System For LLMs Fine-Tuning
Shan, Yimeng
Zhang, Zhaorui
Di, Sheng
Liu, Yu
Lu, Xiaoyi
Liu, Benben
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Machine Learning
Federated Split Learning has been identified as an efficient approach to address the computational resource constraints of clients in classical federated learning, while guaranteeing data privacy for distributed model training across data owners. However, it faces some critical challenges when such a training strategy meets large language models (LLMs) for fine-tuning. Such challenges include setting the cutlayer adaptively across different clients to address the data and device heterogeneity issues, which affect the system performance significantly. In addition, efficiently reducing the communication overhead during the fine-tuning procedure is also another challenge. No work tries to address these challenges. To bridge this gap, we propose SplitTF, an adaptive federated split learning system for LLMs fine-tuning. SplitFT enables different clients to set different cut layers according to their computation resources and trained model performance. SplitFT also proposes to reduce the LoRA rank in cutlayer to reduce the communication overhead. In addition to simulating the heterogeneous data in real-world applications for our proposed split federated learning system, we propose a length-based Dirichlet approach to divide the training data into different clients. Extensive experimental results show that our proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art approach for fine-tuning time efficiency and model performance based on various popular benchmarks.
title SplitFT: An Adaptive Federated Split Learning System For LLMs Fine-Tuning
topic Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.26388