--Fine-tuning foundation models is critical for superior performance on personalized downstream tasks, compared to using pre-trained models. Collaborative learning can leverage local clients' datasets for fine-tuning, but limited client data and heterogeneous data distributions hinder effective collaboration. T o address the challenge, we propose a flexible personalized federated learning paradigm that enables clients to engage in collaborative learning while maintaining personalized objectives. Given the limited and heterogeneous computational resources available on clients, we introduce flexible personalized split federated learning (FlexP-SFL). Based on split learning, FlexP-SFL allows each client to train a portion of the model locally while offloading the rest to a server, according to resource constraints. Additionally, we propose an alignment strategy to improve personalized model performance on global data. Experimental results show that FlexP-SFL outperforms baseline models in personalized fine-tuning efficiency and final accuracy. Foundation models, such as GPT [1], [2] and BERT [3], as well as more recent architectures [4]-[7], are large-scale machine learning models pre-trained on vast and diverse datasets [8]. These models are designed to capture broad and generalizable patterns across multiple domains, enabling strong performance on a wide range of tasks with minimal adaptation.

Federated Learning has emerged as a leading paradigm for decentralized, privacy-preserving learning, particularly relevant in the era of interconnected edge devices equipped with sensors. However, the practical implementation of Federated Learning faces three primary challenges: the need for human involvement in costly data labelling processes for target adaptation, covariate shift in client device data collection due to environmental factors affecting sensors, leading to discrepancies between source and target samples, and the impracticality of continuous or regular model updates in resource-constrained environments due to limited data transmission capabilities and technical constraints on channel availability and energy efficiency. To tackle these issues, we expand upon an efficient and scalable Federated Learning framework tailored for real-world client adaptation in industrial settings. This framework leverages a pre-trained source model comprising a deep backbone, an adaptation module, and a classifier running on a powerful server. By freezing the backbone and classifier during client adaptation on resource-constrained devices, we allow the domain adaptive linear layer to handle target domain adaptation, thus minimizing overall computational overhead. Furthermore, this setup, designated as FedAcross+, is extended to encompass the processing of streaming data, thereby rendering the solution suitable for non-stationary environments. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of FedAcross+ in achieving competitive adaptation on low-end client devices with limited target samples, successfully addressing the challenge of domain shift. Moreover, our framework accommodates sporadic model updates within resource-constrained environments, ensuring practical and seamless deployment.

--Recently, large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable breakthroughs, revolutionizing the natural language processing domain and beyond. Due to immense parameter sizes, fine-tuning these models with private data for diverse downstream tasks has become mainstream. Though federated learning (FL) offers a promising solution for fine-tuning LLMs without sharing raw data, substantial computing costs hinder its democratization. Moreover, in real-world scenarios, private client devices often possess heterogeneous computing resources, further complicating LLM fine-tuning. T o combat these challenges, we propose HSplitLoRA, a heterogeneous parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) framework built on split learning (SL) and low-rank adaptation (LoRA) fine-tuning, for efficiently fine-tuning LLMs on heterogeneous client devices. HSplitLoRA first identifies important weights based on their contributions to LLM training. It then dynamically configures the decomposition ranks of LoRA adapters for selected weights and determines the model split point according to varying computing budgets of client devices. Finally, a noise-free adapter aggregation mechanism is devised to support heterogeneous adapter aggregation without introducing noise. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HSplitLoRA outperforms state-of-the-art benchmarks in training accuracy and convergence speed. Index T erms --Distributed learning, split learning, large language model, parameter-efficient fine-tuning. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have achieved tremendous success across a broad spectrum of pivotal sectors due to their exceptional ability in handling high-complexity and large-scale datasets [1]-[5]. Gao are with the Institute of Space Internet, Fudan University, Shanghai 200438, China, and the School of Computer Science, Fudan University, Shanghai 200438, China (email: zlin20@fudan.edu.cn; Z. Lin is also with the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Hong Kong, Pok Fu Lam, Hong Kong, China. X. Chen is with the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Hong Kong, Pok Fu Lam, Hong Kong, China (e-mail: xchen@eee.hku.hk). V epakomma is with Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139 USA (e-mail: vepakom@mit.edu).

This Increasing privacy concerns and unrestricted access to data communication overhead slows down the convergence of lead to the development of a novel machine learning the Machine Learning algorithms. For example, the client paradigm called Federated Learning (FL). FL borrows many devices could be self-driving cars in which the goal might be of the ideas from distributed machine learning, however, the to create a driver sleep prevention face recognition machine challenges associated with federated learning makes it an learning system preventing road accidents or making use of interesting engineering problem since the models are trained large volumes of traffic training data from cameras in the on edge devices. It was introduced in 2016 by Google, and vehicles to improve the vehicle AI agent's driving since then active research is being carried out in different capability. Because in both cases, due to the possibility of areas within FL such as federated optimization algorithms, collecting large number of samples by increasing the client model and update compression, differential privacy, devices, the data used to train models will have a large robustness, and attacks, federated GANs and privacy variance (carries more Information) and will be more robust preserved personalization. There are many open challenges to bias (race of the driver, different types of roads, and in the development of such federated machine learning pedestrian scenarios) and thus underrepresentation of systems and this project will be focusing on the samples is minimized. The slower client connections might communication bottleneck and data Non IID-ness, and its also cause stragglers.

Cross-device Federated Analytics (FA) is a distributed computation paradigm designed to answer analytics queries about and derive insights from data held locally on users' devices. On-device computations combined with other privacy and security measures ensure that only minimal data is transmitted off-device, achieving a high standard of data protection. Despite FA's broad relevance, the applicability of existing FA systems is limited by compromised accuracy; lack of flexibility for data analytics; and an inability to scale effectively. In this paper, we describe our approach to combine privacy, scalability, and practicality to build and deploy a system that overcomes these limitations. Our FA system leverages trusted execution environments (TEEs) and optimizes the use of on-device computing resources to facilitate federated data processing across large fleets of devices, while ensuring robust, defensible, and verifiable privacy safeguards. We focus on federated analytics (statistics and monitoring), in contrast to systems for federated learning (ML workloads), and we flag the key differences.

Large language models (LLMs) are essential in natural language processing (NLP) but are costly in data collection, pre-training, fine-tuning, and inference. Task-specific small language models (SLMs) offer a cheaper alternative but lack robustness and generalization. This paper proposes LEGO, a novel technique to extract SLMs from an LLM and recombine them. Using state-of-the-art LLM pruning strategies, we can create task- and user-specific SLM building blocks that are efficient for fine-tuning and inference while also preserving user data privacy. LEGO utilizes Federated Learning and a novel aggregation scheme for the LLM reconstruction, maintaining robustness without high costs and preserving user data privacy. We experimentally demonstrate the versatility of LEGO, showing its ability to enable model heterogeneity and mitigate the effects of data heterogeneity while maintaining LLM robustness.

Depression detection using deep learning models has been widely explored in previous studies, especially due to the large amounts of data available from social media posts. These posts provide valuable information about individuals' mental health conditions and can be leveraged to train models and identify patterns in the data. However, distributed learning approaches have not been extensively explored in this domain. In this study, we adopt Federated Learning (FL) to facilitate decentralized training on smartphones while protecting user data privacy. We train three neural network architectures--GRU, RNN, and LSTM on Reddit posts to detect signs of depression and evaluate their performance under heterogeneous FL settings. To optimize the training process, we leverage a common tokenizer across all client devices, which reduces the computational load. Additionally, we analyze resource consumption and communication costs on smartphones to assess their impact in a real-world FL environment. Our experimental results demonstrate that the federated models achieve comparable performance to the centralized models. This study highlights the potential of FL for decentralized mental health prediction by providing a secure and efficient model training process on edge devices.

Edge signal processing facilitates distributed learning and inference in the client-server model proposed in federated learning. In traditional machine learning, clients (IoT devices) that acquire raw signal samples can aid a data center (server) learn a global signal model by pooling these distributed samples at a third-party location. Despite the promising capabilities of IoTs, these distributed deployments often face the challenge of sensitive private data and communication rate constraints. This necessitates a learning approach that communicates a processed approximation of the distributed samples instead of the raw signals. Such a decentralized learning approach using signal approximations will be termed distributed signal analytics in this work. Overpredictive signal approximations may be desired for distributed signal analytics, especially in network demand (capacity) planning applications motivated by federated learning. In this work, we propose algorithms that compute an overpredictive signal approximation at the client devices using an efficient convex optimization framework. Tradeoffs between communication cost, sampling rate, and the signal approximation error are quantified using mathematical analysis. We also show the performance of the proposed distributed algorithms on a publicly available residential energy consumption dataset.