解决多模态模型在异构环境下的联邦微调难题,保护数据隐私同时提升性能。
UniFed-VLM: Federated Instruction Tuning for Vision-Language Models with Multiple Heterogeneity

- 提出统一框架,通过动态加权与补偿机制缓解多维度异构冲突。
- 在多个基准上表现优于现有方法,平均性能提升显著。
- 适合医疗等需隐私保护的跨设备多模态应用,尤其适用于异构客户端。
视觉语言模型(VLMs)在多模态理解与生成任务中表现出色,但其微调通常依赖集中式数据,引发医疗等领域隐私担忧。联邦学习(FL)可在不共享原始数据的前提下实现模型训练,但将其应用于VLM指令微调面临巨大挑战:模型参数量大,且真实场景中客户端在任务、模态和模型架构上存在显著异构性。现有方法多聚焦于简化场景,难以应对多维异构问题。本文研究任务、模态与模型架构三重异构下的联邦指令微调,提出UniFed-VLM统一框架。其核心包含两项技术:1)联邦补偿子空间聚合(FedCSA),通过子空间对齐与动态加权补偿机制,降低异构导致的参数冲突;2)两阶段协同蒸馏(TCoD),利用互蒸馏适配器(MDA)与专家混合蒸馏策略,实现异构模型间有效知识迁移。在多个基准数据集上的实验表明,UniFed-VLM在多样化任务上平均性能显著优于现有联邦方法。代码已开源:https://github.com/wangpengyu2004/UniFed-VLM。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong performance in multimodal understanding and generation. However, fine-tuning of VLMs typically relies on centralized data, which raises privacy concerns in certain domains (e.g. healthcare). Federated Learning (FL) provides a natural solution by enabling model training without sharing raw data. However, applying FL to VLM instruction tuning is highly challenging. VLMs have substantial parameter scales, and in real-world scenarios, clients exhibit significant heterogeneity in tasks, modalities, and model architectures. Existing methods mainly focus on simplified settings and are unable to handle such multi-dimensional heterogeneous scenarios. In this work, we study federated instruction tuning under joint heterogeneity in tasks, modalities, and model architectures. We propose UniFed-VLM, a unified federated instruction tuning framework for VLMs that addresses multiple types of heterogeneity. It consists of two key components: 1) Federated Compensated Subspace Aggregation (FedCSA), which performs subspace-aligned aggregation of parameter-efficient adapters with dynamic weighting and compensation to mitigate heterogeneity-induced conflicts; 2) Two-stage Collaborative Distillation (TCoD), which enables effective knowledge transfer across heterogeneous models via a Mutual Distillation Adapter (MDA) and a mixture-of-experts-based distillation strategy. We conduct experiments on multiple benchmark datasets, and the results show that UniFed-VLM achieves stronger average performance across diverse tasks compared with existing FL methods. The source code is available at: https://github.com/wangpengyu2004/UniFed-VLM.
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