用偏好代替参数,实现跨异构视觉语言模型的隐私保护协同对齐。
Replacing Parameters with Preferences: Federated Alignment of Heterogeneous Vision-Language Models

- 以客户端本地偏好标注训练奖励模型,避免参数与数据直接交换。
- 引入可学习路由的混合奖励机制,自适应融合不同客户端的评价信号。
- 无需模型架构一致,适用于医疗金融等隐私敏感场景的联邦对齐。
视觉-语言模型在医疗、金融等隐私敏感领域潜力巨大,但严格的数据共享限制使集中式训练不可行。联邦学习虽能缓解此问题,但在客户端计算资源、应用需求和模型架构高度异构时仍面临挑战。为此,我们提出MoR框架,将参数聚合替换为基于偏好的协作:各客户端本地利用私有偏好标注训练奖励模型,捕捉特定评估信号而不暴露原始数据;通过引入带有可学习路由的混合奖励机制,动态融合异构奖励信号;服务器则使用带KL惩罚的GRPO优化基础模型,实现偏好对齐,且不要求客户端模型结构一致。在多个公开视觉-语言基准上的实验表明,MoR在泛化性和跨客户端适应性上均优于现有联邦对齐方法。该方法为异构视觉-语言模型在联邦设置下的隐私保护对齐提供了可扩展解决方案。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have broad potential in privacy-sensitive domains such as healthcare and finance, yet strict data-sharing constraints render centralized training infeasible. Federated Learning mitigates this issue by enabling decentralized training, but practical deployments face challenges due to client heterogeneity in computational resources, application requirements, and model architectures. Under extreme model and data heterogeneity, replacing parameter aggregation with preference-based collaboration offers a more suitable interface, as it eliminates the need for direct parameter or data exchange. Motivated by this, we propose MoR, a federated alignment framework that combines GRPO with Mixture-of-Rewards for heterogeneous VLMs. In MoR, each client locally trains a reward model from local preference annotations, capturing specific evaluation signals without exposing raw data. To combine these heterogeneous supervision signals, MoR introduces a Mixture-of-Rewards mechanism with learned routing, which adaptively fuses client reward models according to the input and alignment objective. The server then optimizes a base VLM using GRPO with a KL penalty to a reference model, enabling preference alignment without requiring client models to share architectures or parameters. Experiments on diverse public vision-language benchmarks demonstrate that MoR consistently outperforms federated alignment baselines in generalization and cross-client adaptability. Our approach provides a scalable solution for privacy-preserving alignment of heterogeneous VLMs under federated settings.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。