Dual-Personalizing Adapter for Federated Foundation Models

Recently, foundation models, particularly large language models (LLMs), have demonstrated an impressive ability to adapt to various tasks by fine-tuning diverse instruction data. Notably, federated foundation models (FedFM) emerge as a privacy preservation method to fine-tune models collaboratively under federated learning (FL) settings by leveraging many distributed datasets with non-IID data. To alleviate communication and computation overhead, parameter-efficient methods are introduced for efficiency, and some research adapted personalization methods to FedFM for better user preferences alignment. However, a critical gap in existing research is the neglect of test-time distribution shifts in real-world applications, and conventional methods for test-time distribution shifts in personalized FL are less effective for FedFM due to their failure to adapt to complex distribution shift scenarios and the requirement to train all parameters. To bridge this gap, we refine the setting in FedFM, termed test-time personalization, which aims to learn personalized federated foundation models on clients while effectively handling test-time distribution shifts simultaneously. To address challenges in this setting, we explore a simple yet effective solution, a Federated Dual-Personalizing Adapter (FedDPA) architecture. By co-working with a foundation model, a global adapter and a local adapter jointly tackle the test-time distribution shifts and client-specific personalization. Additionally, we introduce an instance-wise dynamic weighting mechanism that dynamically integrates the global and local adapters for each test instance during inference, facilitating effective test-time personalization. The effectiveness of the proposed method has been evaluated on benchmark datasets across different NLP tasks.

Paper

Similar papers

Peer review

Reviewer 94he3/10 · confidence 4/52024-06-24

Summary

This paper focuses on personalization and test-time adaptation in federated learning of foundation models. The authors propose two solutions for this setting and show its performance on two splits of FLAN dataset.

Strengths

- The paper is generally easy to read. - The constructed experimental setup is genenrally reasonable.

Weaknesses

- The motivation and significance of the setting is not sufficiently strong. The training method in this paper is not new in personalized FL [1,2]. The test-time adaptation method is straightforward and does not convey new insight. Therefore, I do not clearly see the significance of considering personalization and test-time adaptation at the same time. - Limited performance gain. Despite that the paper focuses on personalization and test-time adaptation at the same time, it proposes two methods, one performs better at personalization while the other performs better at test-time adaptation. This is really confusing. If the authors can not find one solution that fits both two metrics, then why bother to consider these two issues in one paper? - Limited performance gain. From the two main tables in the paper, the performance of FedLoRA is stable across two metrics, which always performs the second best. [1] Exploiting shared representations for personalized federated learning [2] Perada: Parameter-efficient and generalizable federated learning personalization with guarantees

Questions

- Why the convergence curve of FedIT so distinct from the others? Also, it is unclear what is the difference between FedIT and FedLoRA.

Rating

3

Confidence

4

Soundness

2

Presentation

2

Contribution

2

Limitations

yes

Reviewer mFUh6/10 · confidence 4/52024-07-12

Summary

The authors use two set of adapters to personalize a model with federated learning. The idea is to use FL to learn the global adapter whereas each device has a local adapter to personalize the model for each client.

Strengths

- The paper is well written and easy to understand - The overall approach is sound - THe authors evaluated their approach on a number of NLP tasks

Weaknesses

Overall this is an interesting paper. However these are some areas to potentially improve: - Firstly, the overall premise: the authors say that this approach is used to learn from distribution shifts between training and test datasets. However, this is the whole reason we use federeated learning. Typically we have models trained on public deatasets (e.g., imagenet, wikipedia, etc), but these don't work on real-world applications because the domain is slightly different. FL was proposed so we can get a real-world (and real-time) signal about in-domain distributions in a privacy-preserving. As a result, we actually do want to learn this "test" distribution during FL. It is unclear why in the FL scenario, the "test" distribution is not similar to the train distribution. Overall, the paper would benefit for a much stronger motivation. - There are a lot of works that use federated learning to learn a global model and then personalize this model for each client (e.g., https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.00710). As a result, the overall approach of training a global model and then having extra client-side personalization is not entirely novel. Furhtermore, there have been many works that train adapters instead of full models in order to save on communication and on-device compute. - At section 3.1 the authors say there are two datasets belonging to two different distributions (Ps vs Pt): why does this happen within a device ? How do you detect that the distribution has shifted ? How does this happen in practice ? - The evaluation has been done in a very artificial scenario where each of the 8 devices had a completely different NLP task (section 5.1). This is quite extreme and it is likely to favour the results that take advantage of personalization. However, this extreme is unlikely to happen in the real FL deployments: typically we want to build a global model from a set of non-IID users but not to an extreme where each user has a different task. Furthemore, we attempt to train large-enough models that can tolerate some distribution shift (as long as it has been seen in the data).

Questions

See Above

Rating

6

Confidence

4

Soundness

2

Presentation

4

Contribution

3

Limitations

N/A

Reviewer vXiN8/10 · confidence 5/52024-07-12

Summary

This paper proposes a novel dual-personalizing adapter to tackle the test-time distribution shift for federated foundation models (FedFM). FedFM is a new research domain to enhance foundation models by leveraging many fine-tuning tasks on many protected datasets for end users. The solution is essentially to tackle the trade-off of personalisation and generalisation of the client-specific models in FedFM.

Strengths

1. FedFM is a new research domain that has been regarded as an important pathway to enhance foundation models by leveraging decentralized data. Tackling the tradeoff between client-specific personalisation and generalisation is a key challenge of the FedFM research domain. 2. The proposed method is a new idea with original design. Moreover, this paper is the first work to discuss the test-time generalization challenge on FedFM. 3. The proposed method is technique sounds. The design of the method is simple yet effective. It is very easy to follow. 4. In terms of clarity, the paper’s contents are well organized and clearly presented with easy-to-understand figures and well-described details. 5. The appendix with experiment details and the source codes are provided to support the reproducibility of this work.

Weaknesses

1. The important weight of the global adapter and personalised adapter is a key factor of the proposed dual-personalising adapter mechanism in FedFM. More insightful discussion is expected to analyse the selection of the important weights. 2. The proposed instance-wise trade-off mechanism essentially relies on the similarity between the test instance and training dataset. The current solution is straightforward and reasonable, however it could be elaborately designed. 3. It would be better if a large-scale experiment could be conducted to further evaluate the proposed method. However, considering the lack of computation resources, this paper’s experiment is sufficient enough as an initial exploration and discussion of this research direction.

Questions

1. In line 260, what type of similarity function will be chosen and why? 2. According to the design of alpha, if the new test instance is more similar to the client’s training instances in a representation space, the local adapter will gain a bigger importance weight. Any theoretical discussion about this? 3. Why FedDPA-F wins more times than FedDPA-T? 4. Are there any other data sources other than Flan that can be used in this type of setting?

Rating

8

Confidence

5

Soundness

4

Presentation

4

Contribution

4

Limitations

N/A

Reviewer D5Ab7/10 · confidence 5/52024-07-13

Summary

Federated Foundation Models (FedFM) is an emerging research domain to study collaboratively fine-tuning the pre-trained foundation models. This paper studied a test-time distribution shift problem on FedFM by proposing a new dual-personalising adapter.

Strengths

1) The proposed method is novel. The targeting problem is new while a new setting is created in the experimental study. 2) The paper presents high-quality content and novelty design. The claimed points are well supported by theoretical discussion and experimental analysis. The appendix and source codes provide sufficient details of the experiment. 3) The clarity of this paper is excellent. 4) The targeting problem is significant to the emerging domain of FedFM.

Weaknesses

1) According to Eq 1, the P_all is all potential distributions. However, in real applications, the clients are usually insufficient to represent all possible distributions. A discussion is required to clarify this assumption. 2) The implementation framework heavily relies on the LoRA, thus the contribution is reduced. 3) The experiment setting assumes each client owns one type of dataset or task. What’s the difference with multi-task learning? Should you compare it with some multi-task learning baseline methods?

Questions

1. Is it possible to apply this dual-personalizing adapter framework to other types of data, for example, image recognition, recommendation, time series, and multimodality data? 2. Is it possible to merge two Federated Datasets into one so that you can have 16 clients? 3. Line 315, how to fix the value of alpha? According to the design, the value of alpha should be decided by a dynamic weighting mechanism. 4. In future work, the author mentioned “theoretical analysis and more datasets”. Why do you think this method needs a theoretical analysis that can make a significant difference to this paper? What are the potential major challenges to applying this method to other datasets that prevent you from finishing these experiments in this paper?

Rating

7

Confidence

5

Soundness

4

Presentation

4

Contribution

4

Limitations

N/A

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-11

Dear Reviewers, Sincerely thank you for reading our rebuttal. We hope that our rebuttal has effectively addressed your comments and concerns. if you have any further questions about our paper or the rebuttal, please let us know. Thank you. Best regards, Authors

Reviewer D5Ab2024-08-11

The authors' great efforts made in the rebuttal have been appreciated. After carefully checking it, my queries have been well replied and I will keep my score.

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-12

Dear Reviewer mFUh, As the author-reviewer discussion period is approaching its end on 13 August, we respectfully ask whether we have addressed all your questions and concerns.

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-12

Dear Reviewer 94he, As the author-reviewer discussion period is approaching its end on 13 August, we respectfully ask whether we have addressed all your questions and concerns.

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-14

Dear reviewer 94he, We believe that we have addressed the concerns that you have raised. Specifically, 1. Our work does **not focus on test-time adaptation [1] but test-time generalization**, where clients must maintain performance on their main tasks while also demonstrating generalization capabilities on new tasks during testing without any adaptation methods. Unlike the works you mentioned, our work is the first to explore the test-time generalization of personalized federated foundation models (FFM) [2], an emerging domain that significantly diverges from traditional FL. We establish the benchmark by refining the new setting (test-time personalization), proposing the new training paradigm with self-reconstructed datasets for personalized FFM, and introducing a new dynamic weighting mechanism to determine the combination of different adapters for test-time personalization. 2. Our proposed solution is a unified design, the mentioned two methods are **under the same solution with different hyperparameters** (different optimizing strategies) as illustrated in **Section 4**, and it is a common way to try different optimizing strategies in FL such as [3]. Since our paper aims to improve the test-time generalization without sacrificing the performance on personalization, we take the personalization metric as validation results and the test-time generalization metric as test results. 3. The objective of our paper is to improve the test-time generalization of FFM without sacrificing personalization performance. In our two main tables (**Table 1 & 2**), our proposed method shows an average improvement of **2.3%** (even **8.4%** higher in the summarization task) over FedLoRA in the test-time generalization metric with relatively higher performance of personalization. 4. The difference between FedIT and FedLoRA lies in whether there is a personalization step or not. FedIT focuses on training a global model applicable across all clients, while FedLoRA adapts the global model to each client with further fine-tuning for personalization. For a more detailed discussion, please refer to **Appendix A.2**. [1] Liang, J., He, R., & Tan, T. (2024). A comprehensive survey on test-time adaptation under distribution shifts. International Journal of Computer Vision, 1-34. [2] Ren, C., Yu, H., Peng, H., Tang, X., Li, A., Gao, Y., ... & Yang, Q. (2024). Advances and open challenges in federated learning with foundation models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.15381. [3] Tian Li, Shengyuan Hu, AhmadBeirami, and Virginia Smith, “Ditto: Fair and Robust Federated Learning Through Personalization”, ICML 2021 *** We would like to gently remind you that the **end of the discussion period is imminent**. We would appreciate it if you could let us know whether our comments addressed your concerns. Best regards, Authors

Reviewer mFUh2024-08-12

I want to thank the authors for their answers. After reading the rebuttal and the other reviews, the authors did address some of the comments. I am still not entirely convinced about the motivation (I.e,. real-world use-cases) but I will increase my score to reflect this.

Reviewer 94he2024-08-14

Thanks for the responses. However, my concerns are not well addressed. - W1. I still do not clearly see the motivation for considering such scenario. Are there specific and reasonable real-world application scenarios? - W2 & W3. It seems like that you are cherry-picking the results in the rebuttal. In Table 1, your two methods perform comparably with FedLoRA, and no one method can consistently perform the best. Specifically, for test-time personalization, FedDPA-T performs worse than FedLoRA.

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-14

Thanks for your responses. For W1, let's consider the recommendation system in real-world application scenarios. Each user has their own areas of interest (e.g., user1 focuses on book reading), and there is sufficient historical clicking/viewing data for training and personalization. However, users may have new interests at any time, for example, user1 focusing on reading is becoming interested in dancing. Since the user has no historical data about the new interest and this recommendation for new interest only happens during inference/testing, the test-time generalization ability of the personalized model becomes significant in this case. For W2 and W3, our main focus is to improve the generalization ability without sacrificing the personalization performance; therefore, as long as our method can outperform other methods on test time personalization with comparable results on personalization, it proves the effectiveness of our method. FedDPA-T and FedDPA-F are under the same solution with different optimizing strategies, which means that either method performing better than other baselines on test-time personalization can prove the effectiveness of our proposed solution. In Table 1&2, FedDPA-F consistently performs better than FedLoRA on test-time personalization and maintains comparable performance on personalization, which has sufficiently demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed solution. FedDPA-T performs worse than FedLoRA, which can only indicate that the optimizing strategy used for FedDPA-T is not beneficial for test-time generalization. These results are from Table 1 & 2 on test-time personalization | Dataset1 | Paraphrase | Entailment | Structure to Text | Text Formatting | Linguistic Acc| Word Dis | Coreference | Question CLS | | ---- | ---- | ---- | ---- | ---- | ---- | ---- | ---- | ---- | | FedLoRA | 75.56 | 76.55 | 75.21 | 74.94 | 76.16 | 74.64 | 74.99 | 76.97 | | FedDPA-F | **78.10** | **77.36** | **77.18** | **76.98** | **77.11** | **76.23** | **76.84** | **77.19**| | Dataset2 | Paraphrase | Commonsense | Entailment | Text Formatting | Summarization | Reading Com | Sentiment | Open QA | | ---- | ---- | ---- | ---- | ---- | ---- | ---- | ---- | ---- | | FedLoRA | 69.60 | 71.64 | 71.09 | 71.28 | 65.63 | 68.89 | 70.32 | 70.44 | | FedDPA-F | **71.64** | **72.28** | **72.42** | **72.39** | **71.12** | **70.46** | **71.00** | **71.82**|

Program Chairsdecision2024-09-25

Decision

Accept (poster)

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