解决异构设备下低秩微调的信息分配问题,提升联邦学习效果。
PreLort: Prefix-Nested LoRA for Federated Fine-Tuning under Rank Heterogeneity
- 构建前缀层级的低秩结构,让低秩维度聚焦关键任务信息。
- 按段聚合,避免低秩客户端稀释高秩贡献,提升信息利用率。
- 适合资源不均的联邦学习场景,尤其适用于边缘设备部署。
使用参数高效方法(如LoRA)进行联邦微调,可在保护隐私的同时适配大语言模型。然而,异构硬件导致客户端适配器秩不同,无法直接聚合。现有方法虽支持异构秩聚合,但未能控制信息在秩维度上的分布,造成共享低秩表示利用不足。为此,我们提出PreLort:一种嵌套低秩的联邦LoRA框架,将适配器维度组织为前缀层级结构。该方法确保低秩维度编码任务相关特征,高秩维度保留额外容量。在此基础上,提出(1)分段聚合规则,仅对贡献某秩段的客户端进行平均,避免零填充的低秩客户端稀释信息;(2)前缀嵌套训练策略,通过多秩截断优化适配器,促使有用信号集中在低秩前缀维度。二者协同使低秩前缀持续学习并聚合最相关的任务信息,高秩维度则补充额外能力。因此,低秩客户端可受益于高秩客户端的丰富信息。实验表明,本方法在多个基模型上均优于现有异构联邦LoRA方法,在准确率和ROUGE-L上表现更优,同时困惑度更低或相当。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Federated fine-tuning of large language models using parameter-efficient methods such as LoRA enables privacy-preserving adaptation of foundation models. Heterogeneous hardware resources introduce challenges, as clients with different adapter ranks cannot be directly aggregated. While existing methods enable aggregation under heterogeneous ranks, they fail to control how information is distributed across rank dimensions, leading to suboptimal use of shared low-rank representations. Instead, we propose PreLort: a nested low-rank formulation for federated LoRA that organizes adapter dimensions into a prefix hierarchy. Our approach ensures that lower-rank dimensions encode task-relevant information, while higher-rank dimensions capture additional capacity. Building on this, we introduce (i) a segment-wise aggregation rule that averages only over clients contributing to each rank segment, avoiding dilution from zero-padded lower-rank clients, and (ii) a prefix-nested training strategy that optimizes each adapter under multiple rank truncations, encouraging useful signal to concentrate in low-rank prefix dimensions. Together, these components encourage a consistent low-rank prefix capturing the most task-relevant information, while higher-rank dimensions learn additional capacity. This allows low-rank clients to benefit from richer information contributed by higher-rank clients, as prefix dimensions are consistently learned and aggregated. Experiments demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms prior heterogeneous federated LoRA methods in accuracy and ROUGE-L, while achieving lower or comparable perplexity across multiple base models.
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