Cited by 142Privacy-Preserving Technologies in DataTopic ModelingDomain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning

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FederatedScope-LLM: A Comprehensive Package for Fine-tuning Large Language Models in Federated Learning

Open access
Kuang, Weirui, Qian, Bingchen, Li, Zitao, Chen, Daoyuan, Gao, Dawei, Pan, Xuchen, Xie, Yuexiang, Li, Yaliang, Ding, Bolin, Zhou, Jingren·2024·Proceedings of the 30th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated great capabilities in various natural language understanding and generation tasks.These pre-trained LLMs can be further improved for specific downstream tasks by fine-tuning.However, the adoption of LLM in real-world applications can be hindered by privacy concerns and the resource-intensive nature of model training and fine-tuning.When multiple entities have similar interested tasks but cannot directly share their local data due to privacy regulations, federated learning (FL) is a mainstream solution to leverage the data of different entities.Besides avoiding direct data sharing, FL can also achieve rigorous data privacy protection, model intelligent property protection, and model customization via composition with different techniques.Despite the aforementioned advantages of FL, fine-tuning LLMs in FL settings still lacks adequate support from the existing frameworks and, therefore, faces challenges in optimizing the consumption of significant communication and computational resources, preparing various data for different tasks, and satisfying diverse information protection demands.

Overview

AI snapshot

Written from the paper’s full text.

TL;DR

FederatedScope-LLM (FS-LLM) is an open-source package built on FederatedScope for end-to-end federated fine-tuning of large language models, with benchmarking datasets, PEFT algorithms, and efficiency-oriented training operators. Experiments show federated PEFT, especially LoRA, can approach centralized fine-tuning while greatly reducing communication and computation costs, and also expose open challenges in privacy-preserving, personalized, and hyperparameter-optimized federated LLM fine-tuning.

Key findings

  • FS-LLM provides three main modules: LLM-Benchmarks for federated fine-tuning datasets and evaluation, LLM-AlgZoo for PEFT and no-full-model algorithms, and LLM-Trainer for acceleration/resource-efficient operators and extensibility.
  • In LLaMA-7B experiments, LoRA outperformed P-tuning and prompt tuning across all three tasks under federated settings: Fed-CodeAlpaca 13.29±0.10 vs 9.71±0.66 and 9.63±0.36; Fed-Dolly 46.57±0.24 vs 41.50±0.32 and 40.72±0.64; Fed-GSM8K-3 14.25±1.37 vs 11.75±0.39 and 9.86±0.59. Federated fine-tuning also substantially outperformed local fine-tuning and was competitive with global/centralized fine-tuning.
  • PEFT algorithms had similar GPU memory usage (13,440–13,538 MB) but very different message sizes: full fine-tuning 12,852.01 MB, LoRA 21.40 MB, P-tuning 256.48 MB, prompt tuning 0.17 MB. At 100 Mbps, per-round transmission time ranged from about 0.01 seconds with prompt tuning to 40 seconds with P-tuning.
  • FedOT without full model access remained competitive at 20% layer dropping (Fed-CodeAlpaca 7.14±2.75, Fed-Dolly 44.88±0.75, Fed-GSM8K-3 9.02±0.71), but at 50% dropping performance collapsed (0.16±0.15, 37.01±2.34, 2.98±0.98). pFedMe did not outperform FedAvg under any tested data distribution, and validation loss ranks were inconsistent with evaluation-score ranks in FedHPO.

Methods

  • The package is built on FederatedScope and automates dataset preprocessing, federated fine-tuning execution/simulation, and performance evaluation. It includes curated federated datasets: Fed-CodeAlpaca (9 clients, ~8.0k samples), Fed-Dolly (8 clients, ~15.0k samples), and Fed-GSM8K-3 (3 clients, ~7.5k samples), paired with HumanEval, HELM, and GSM8K-test evaluations.
  • Main experiments fine-tune LLaMA-7B with LoRA, P-tuning, and prompt tuning under global, federated, and local scenarios using FedAvg; OPT-2.7B is tested with LoRA. FedOT uses the first and last two LLaMA-7B layers as the adapter and an emulator compressed by dropping 20% or 50% of remaining layers. pFL compares pFedMe and FedAvg with LoRA under Dirichlet-split Fed-CodeAlpaca variants (α from 0.05 to 50.0).
  • Experimental protocol: 500 communication rounds, 30 local update steps, batch size 1, three random seeds, average evaluation score with standard deviation. Evaluation score is Pass@1 for HumanEval, a mixture of 16 HELM subtask metrics, and accuracy for GSM8K-test. Hardware includes Nvidia A100 80GB and V100 32GB machines.

Limitations

  • Stated by the paper: prefix-tuning was excluded from experiments because its implementation contained unresolved issues; OPT-2.7B failed some HELM subtasks due to exceeded input length; pFedMe underperformed FedAvg, partly because half-precision training restricted the usable hyperparameter space; FedOT has a trade-off between compression rate and model performance; validation loss may not reliably indicate generalization performance; cross-device federated LLM fine-tuning is left as future work.
  • Evident from the text: the main benchmark tables report only LLaMA-7B and OPT-2.7B, with additional LLM results deferred to the full version; the paper also notes unresolved compatibility issues between efficient training operators and pFL algorithms, and between shared-base-LLM adapter designs and some pFL algorithms.

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Crossref · 10.1145/3637528.3671573

Cites

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15 Own interpretation · 15 Own result · 9 Not checked yet · 7 No basis given · 3 Own method · 1 Supported so far · 1 Partly supported · accuracy not yet measured

Verify all 24 references — free account

Show all 28 claims

  • Probably not a substantial claim. 9
  • It may state two separate claims as one. 13
  • The quote only partly states this claim. 1
23 of 23
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Fine-tuning LLMs requires high computational resources and substantial domain data that may not be sharable due to privacy concerns.

    “However, fine-tuning LLMs entails a high demand for computational resources and a substantial amount of domain data that may not be sharable due to privacy concerns.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Communication and computation resources of clients in FL are usually limited.

    “As communication and computation resources of clients are usually limited in FL”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Fine-tuning LLMs in FL is very costly.

    “Since fine-tuning LLMs in FL is very costly”
3 of 3

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Citations

Cites

Research works printed but not linked: 24

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Metadata

Authors
Kuang, W., Qian, B., Li, Z., Chen, D., Gao, D., Pan, X., Xie, Y., Li, Y., Ding, B., & Zhou, J.
Affiliations
  • Alibaba Group (China) (CN)
  • Alibaba Group (United States) (US)
Venue
Proceedings of the 30th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining
Publisher
ACM
Published
2024-08-24
Pages
5260-5271
OpenAlex
W4401863415
Cited by
142
References
17
Citations by year
2026: 59 · 2025: 63 · 2024: 16
FWCI
40.72
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD) (publishedVersion, other-oa)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Privacy-Preserving Technologies in Data
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Topic Modeling
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning
Keywords
federated learning, large language models, LLM fine-tuning, privacy-preserving machine learning, data privacy, communication efficiency, computational resource efficiency

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