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arXiv 提交日期: 2026-05-12
📄 Abstract - Beyond Parameter Aggregation: Semantic Consensus for Federated Fine-Tuning of LLMs

Federated fine-tuning of large language models is commonly formulated as a parameter aggregation problem. However, even parameter-efficient methods require transmitting large collections of trainable weights, assume aligned architectures, and rely on white-box access to model parameters. As model sizes continue to grow and deployments become increasingly heterogeneous, these assumptions become progressively misaligned with practical constraints. We consider an alternative formulation in which collaboration is mediated through model behavior rather than parameters. Clients fine-tune local models on private data and exchange generated outputs on a shared, public prompt set. The server maps these outputs into a semantic representation space, forms a per-prompt semantic consensus, and returns pseudo-labels for further local fine-tuning. This formulation fundamentally changes the communication scaling of federated LLM fine-tuning. The amount of information exchanged depends only on the public prompt budget and the size of the communicated behaviors, independent of model size. As a consequence, the protocol naturally accommodates heterogeneous architectures and applies directly to open-ended text generation. We present a theoretical analysis and empirical results demonstrating that this approach can match strong federated fine-tuning baselines while substantially reducing communication by orders of magnitude (e.g., analytically by a factor of $1006$ for Llama3.1-405B), as well as reductions in runtime and energy consumption. These results suggest that, for generative foundation models, behavior-level consensus provides a more appropriate abstraction for federated adaptation than parameter aggregation.

顶级标签: llm federated learning
详细标签: semantic consensus parameter aggregation communication efficiency heterogeneous architectures behavior-level collaboration 或 搜索:

超越参数聚合:大型语言模型联邦微调的语义共识方法 / Beyond Parameter Aggregation: Semantic Consensus for Federated Fine-Tuning of LLMs


1️⃣ 一句话总结

本文提出一种新的联邦微调框架,不再依赖传统方法中交换模型参数,而是让各客户端仅在公共提示集上共享模型输出,服务器通过分析这些输出的语义来达成共识,从而大幅降低通信开销、支持异构模型架构,并显著减少运行时间和能耗。

源自 arXiv: 2605.11857