Authors
- Lingjuan Lyu
- Ziyao Wang
- Zheyu Shen
- Yexiao He
- Guoheng Sun
- Hongyi Wang
- Ang Li
Venue
- NeurIPS 2024
Date
- 2024
FLoRA: Federated Fine-Tuning Large Language Models with Heterogeneous Low- Rank Adaptations
Ziyao Wang
Zheyu Shen
Yexiao He
Guoheng Sun
Hongyi Wang
Ang Li
NeurIPS 2024
2024
Abstract
The rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs) has been pivotal in advancing AI, with pre-trained LLMs being adaptable to diverse downstream tasks through fine-tuning. Federated learning (FL) further enhances fine-tuning in a privacy-aware manner by utilizing clients' local data through in-situ computation, eliminating the need for data movement. However, fine-tuning LLMs, given their massive scale of parameters, poses challenges for clients with constrained and heterogeneous resources in FL. Previous methods employed low-rank adaptation (LoRA) for efficient federated fine-tuning but utilized traditional FL aggregation strategies on LoRA adapters. This approach led to mathematically inaccurate aggregation noise, reducing fine-tuning effectiveness and failing to address heterogeneous LoRAs. In this work, we first highlight the mathematical incorrectness of LoRA aggregation in existing federated fine-tuning methods. We introduce a new approach called FLoRA that enables federated fine-tuning on heterogeneous LoRA adapters across clients through a novel stacking-based aggregation method. Our approach is noise-free and seamlessly supports heterogeneous LoRAs. Extensive experiments demonstrate FLoRA's superior performance in both homogeneous and heterogeneous settings, surpassing state-of-the-art methods. We envision this work as a milestone for efficient, privacy-preserving, and accurate federated fine-tuning of LLMs.
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