FLoRIST: Singular Value Thresholding for Efficient and Accurate Federated Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models

Abstract

Integrating Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) into federated learning offers a promising solution for parameter-efficient fine-tuning of Large Language Models (LLMs) without sharing local data. However, several methods designed for federated LoRA present significant challenges in balancing communication efficiency, model accuracy, and computational cost, particularly among heterogeneous clients. These methods either rely on simplistic averaging of local adapters, which introduces aggregation noise, require transmitting large stacked local adapters, leading to poor communication efficiency, or necessitate reconstructing memory-dense global weight-update matrix and performing computationally expensive decomposition to design client-specific low-rank adapters. In this work, we propose FLoRIST, a federated fine-tuning framework that achieves mathematically accurate aggregation without incurring high communication or computational overhead. Instead of constructing the full global weight-update matrix at the server, FLoRIST employs an efficient decomposition pipeline by performing singular value decomposition on stacked local adapters separately. This approach operates within a compact intermediate space to represent the accumulated information from local LoRAs. We introduce tunable singular value thresholding for server-side optimal rank selection to construct a pair of global low-rank adapters shared by all clients. Extensive empirical evaluations across multiple datasets and LLMs demonstrate that FLoRIST consistently strikes the best balance between superior communication efficiency and competitive performance in both homogeneous and heterogeneous setups.