在带宽受限下训练语言模型,实现可证明的精度与可靠性保障
Federated Language Models Under Bandwidth Budgets: Distillation Rates and Conformal Coverage
- 提出联邦探针对数蒸馏法,量化带宽影响以保证训练一致性
- 设计联邦共形RAG推理框架,实现无需分布假设的覆盖率保证
- 首次将每节点带宽纳入统计分析,适合医疗/企业等隐私敏感场景
在数据分散于带宽受限节点且无法集中化的场景(如临床网络、企业知识库、科研联盟)中训练语言模型具有重要意义。本文研究数据必须保持分布式时,在明确带宽预算下的理论可实现性,旨在刻画理论上可保证的性能边界。现有理论仅关注训练期一致性或推理期校准之一,未将带宽作为首要统计参数。本文分析两种协议:用于训练的联邦探针对数蒸馏(FPLD)和用于推理的联邦共形RAG(FC-RAG)。主要结果一:给出FPLD的高概率KL一致性率,显式依赖节点数K、每节点样本量n、量化预算B、探针集大小m和词表大小V;带宽仅通过指数衰减的量化项体现。结果二:提供FC-RAG的无分布边际覆盖率保证,其新颖的检索-带宽松弛项Δ_RAG = f_max√(K^{-2}∑_i v(B_i))使每节点检索带宽成为核心统计参数,节点间算术聚合使松弛项随K^{-1/2}缩小。一个类似Pinsker的推论将两结果组合成端到端覆盖率保证。合成实验验证了边界参数的预测缩放关系;基于GPT-2的小规模实验表明,真实语言模型下带宽-精度权衡仍成立。大规模部署评估不在本研究范围。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Training a language model on data scattered across bandwidth-limited nodes that cannot be centralized is a setting that arises in clinical networks, enterprise knowledge bases, and scientific consortia. We study the regime in which data must remain distributed across nodes, and ask what statistical guarantees are in principle achievable under explicit bandwidth budgets; we aim to characterize what is provably possible, not to demonstrate a deployment-ready system. Existing theory treats either training-time consistency or inference-time calibration in isolation, and no prior work makes bandwidth a first-class statistical parameter. We analyze two protocols, Federated Probe-Logit Distillation (FPLD) for training and Federated Conformal RAG (FC-RAG) for inference, as the analytical vehicles for our results. Our first main result is an explicit high-probability KL-consistency rate for FPLD with simultaneous dependence on node count $K$, per-node sample size $n$, quantization budget $B$, probe-set size $m$, and vocabulary size $V$; bandwidth enters only through an exponentially vanishing quantization term. Our second main result is a distribution-free marginal-coverage bound for FC-RAG, whose novel retrieval-bandwidth slack $Δ_{\mathrm{RAG}} = f_{\max}\sqrt{K^{-2}\sum_i v(B_i)}$ makes per-node retrieval bandwidth a first-class statistical parameter, with arithmetic aggregation across $K$ nodes shrinking the slack as $K^{-1/2}$ in the per-node-uniform regime. A Pinsker-type corollary composes the two bounds into an end-to-end coverage guarantee. Synthetic experiments verify the predicted scaling along the bounds' parameters; small-scale experiments on a GPT-2 testbed illustrate that the qualitative bandwidth-accuracy tradeoff survives on a real language model. A deployment-scale empirical evaluation is out of scope.
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