FedSmoothLoRA: Toward Smoother and Faster Convergence in Federated Low-Rank Adaptation

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Hauptverfasser: Wang, Zehao, Yang, Guanglei, Zeng, Yihan, Xu, Hang, Zhang, Hongzhi, Zuo, Wangmeng, Feng, Chun-Mei
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Wang, Zehao
Yang, Guanglei
Zeng, Yihan
Xu, Hang
Zhang, Hongzhi
Zuo, Wangmeng
Feng, Chun-Mei
author_facet Wang, Zehao
Yang, Guanglei
Zeng, Yihan
Xu, Hang
Zhang, Hongzhi
Zuo, Wangmeng
Feng, Chun-Mei
contents Federated fine-tuning of foundation models with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) provides an efficient solution for reducing communication and computation costs while preserving data locality. However, the direct combination of FedAvg and LoRA suffers from three key issues: limited update space, which restricts the model's effective learning capacity; inter-round state mismatch, which disrupts cross-round local optimization continuity; and a client-agnostic starting state, which slows local convergence on clients. Although recent methods mitigate the limited update space issue by merging LoRA updates into the backbone across communication rounds, inter-round state mismatch and the client-agnostic starting state remain insufficiently addressed. To address these issues, we propose FedSmoothLoRA, a federated LoRA tuning framework that preserves the enlarged update space, improves cross-round local optimization continuity, and provides a client-aware starting state for local training. At each communication round, FedSmoothLoRA constructs the local LoRA initialization using two matrices: a Round-Matching matrix that preserves cross-round local state continuity, and a Gradient-Aligned matrix that provides client-specific optimization guidance from gradient signals estimated on local data. Together, these designs enable smoother and faster convergence. Extensive experiments on image classification and natural language generation tasks demonstrate that FedSmoothLoRA consistently outperforms existing federated LoRA tuning methods. Code: https://github.com/wangzehao0704/FedSmoothLoRA
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_29460
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle FedSmoothLoRA: Toward Smoother and Faster Convergence in Federated Low-Rank Adaptation
Wang, Zehao
Yang, Guanglei
Zeng, Yihan
Xu, Hang
Zhang, Hongzhi
Zuo, Wangmeng
Feng, Chun-Mei
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Federated fine-tuning of foundation models with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) provides an efficient solution for reducing communication and computation costs while preserving data locality. However, the direct combination of FedAvg and LoRA suffers from three key issues: limited update space, which restricts the model's effective learning capacity; inter-round state mismatch, which disrupts cross-round local optimization continuity; and a client-agnostic starting state, which slows local convergence on clients. Although recent methods mitigate the limited update space issue by merging LoRA updates into the backbone across communication rounds, inter-round state mismatch and the client-agnostic starting state remain insufficiently addressed. To address these issues, we propose FedSmoothLoRA, a federated LoRA tuning framework that preserves the enlarged update space, improves cross-round local optimization continuity, and provides a client-aware starting state for local training. At each communication round, FedSmoothLoRA constructs the local LoRA initialization using two matrices: a Round-Matching matrix that preserves cross-round local state continuity, and a Gradient-Aligned matrix that provides client-specific optimization guidance from gradient signals estimated on local data. Together, these designs enable smoother and faster convergence. Extensive experiments on image classification and natural language generation tasks demonstrate that FedSmoothLoRA consistently outperforms existing federated LoRA tuning methods. Code: https://github.com/wangzehao0704/FedSmoothLoRA
title FedSmoothLoRA: Toward Smoother and Faster Convergence in Federated Low-Rank Adaptation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.29460