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arXiv · 2507.01216

PAE MobiLLM: Privacy-Aware and Efficient LLM Fine-Tuning on the Mobile Device via Additive Side-Tuning

Xingke Yang·Liang Li·Zhiyi Wan·Sicong Li·Xiaoqi Qi·Jiang Liu·Tomoaki Ohtsuki·Xin Fu·Miao Pan
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Abstract

There is a huge gap between numerous intriguing applications fostered by on-device large language model (LLM) fine-tuning (FT) from fresh mobile data and the limited resources of a mobile device. While existing server-assisted methods (e.g., split learning or side-tuning) may enable LLM FT on the local mobile device, they suffer from heavy communication burdens of activation transmissions, and may disclose data and labels to the server. To address those issues, we develop PAE MobiLLM, a a privacy-aware and efficient LLM FT method which can be deployed on the mobile device via server-assisted additive side-tuning. To further accelerate FT convergence and improve computing efficiency, PAE MobiLLM integrates activation caching on the server side, which allows the server to reuse historical activations and saves the mobile device from repeatedly computing forward passes for the recurring data samples. Besides, to reduce communication cost, PAE MobiLLM develops an activation shortcut that transmits only the token involved in the loss calculation instead of full activation matrices to guide the side network tuning. Last but not least, PAE MobiLLM introduces the additive adapter side-network design which makes the server train the adapter modules based on device-defined prediction differences rather than raw ground-truth labels. In this way, the server can only assist device-defined side-network computing, and learn nothing about data and labels. Extensive experimental results demonstrate PAE MobiLLM's superiority.

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Xingke Yang, Liang Li, Zhiyi Wan, Sicong Li, Xiaoqi Qi, Jiang Liu, Tomoaki Ohtsuki, Xin Fu, Miao Pan. 2025-07-01. PAE MobiLLM: Privacy-Aware and Efficient LLM Fine-Tuning on the Mobile Device via Additive Side-Tuning. https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.01216

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