Author name cluster

Jieming Bian

Possible papers associated with this exact author name in Arrow. This page groups case-insensitive exact name matches and is not a full identity disambiguation profile.

4 papers

1 author row

AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

FedALT: Federated Fine-Tuning Through Adaptive Local Training with Rest-of-World LoRA

Jieming Bian
Lei Wang
Letian Zhang
Jie Xu

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) in federated settings enables privacy-preserving adaptation but suffers from cross-client interference due to model aggregation. Existing federated LoRA fine-tuning methods, primarily based on FedAvg, struggle with data heterogeneity, leading to harmful cross-client interference and suboptimal personalization. In this work, we propose FedALT, a novel personalized federated LoRA fine-tuning algorithm that fundamentally departs from FedAvg. Instead of using an aggregated model to initialize local training, each client continues training its individual LoRA while incorporating shared knowledge through a separate Rest-of-World (RoW) LoRA component. To effectively balance local adaptation and global information, FedALT introduces an adaptive mixer that dynamically learns input-specific weightings between the individual and RoW LoRA components, drawing conceptual foundations from the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) paradigm. Through extensive experiments on NLP benchmarks, we demonstrate that FedALT significantly outperforms state-of-the-art personalized federated LoRA fine-tuning methods, achieving superior local adaptation without sacrificing computational efficiency.

PDF Details DOI

NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Adaptive LoRA Experts Allocation and Selection for Federated Fine-Tuning

Lei Wang
Jieming Bian
Letian Zhang
Jie Xu

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across various tasks, but fine-tuning them for domain-specific applications often requires substantial domain-specific data that may be distributed across multiple organizations. Federated Learning (FL) offers a privacy-preserving solution, but faces challenges with computational constraints when applied to LLMs. Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has emerged as a parameter-efficient fine-tuning approach, though a single LoRA module often struggles with heterogeneous data across diverse domains. This paper addresses two critical challenges in federated LoRA fine-tuning: 1. determining the optimal number and allocation of LoRA experts across heterogeneous clients, and 2. enabling clients to selectively utilize these experts based on their specific data characteristics. We propose FedLEASE (Federated adaptive LoRA Expert Allocation and SElection), a novel framework that adaptively clusters clients based on representation similarity to allocate and train domain-specific LoRA experts. It also introduces an adaptive top-$M$ Mixture-of-Experts mechanism that allows each client to select the optimal number of utilized experts. Our extensive experiments on diverse benchmark datasets demonstrate that FedLEASE significantly outperforms existing federated fine-tuning approaches in heterogeneous client settings while maintaining communication efficiency.

PDF Details

NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

FedEL: Federated Elastic Learning for Heterogeneous Devices

Letian Zhang
Bo Chen
Jieming Bian
Lei Wang
Jie Xu

Federated learning (FL) enables distributed devices to collaboratively train machine learning (ML) models while maintaining data privacy. However, the heterogeneous hardware capabilities of participating devices often result in significant training delays, as straggler clients with limited resources prolong the aggregation process. Existing solutions such as client selection, asynchronous FL, and partial training partially address these challenges but encounter issues such as reduced accuracy, stale updates, and compromised model performance due to inconsistent training contributions. To overcome these limitations, we propose FedEL, a federated elastic learning framework that enhances training efficiency while maintaining model accuracy. FedEL introduces a novel window-based training process, sliding the window to locate the training part of the model and dynamically selecting important tensors for training within a coordinated runtime budget. This approach ensures progressive and balanced training across all clients, including stragglers. Additionally, FedEL employs a tensor importance adjustment module, harmonizing local and global tensor importance to mitigate biases caused by data heterogeneity. The experiment results shows that FedEL achieves up to 3. 87× improvement in time-to-accuracy compared to baselines while maintaining or exceeding final test accuracy.

PDF Details

NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Taming Cross-Domain Representation Variance in Federated Prototype Learning with Heterogeneous Data Domains

Lei Wang
Jieming Bian
Letian Zhang
Chen Chen
Jie Xu

Federated learning (FL) allows collaborative machine learning training without sharing private data. While most FL methods assume identical data domains across clients, real-world scenarios often involve heterogeneous data domains. Federated Prototype Learning (FedPL) addresses this issue, using mean feature vectors as prototypes to enhance model generalization. However, existing FedPL methods create the same number of prototypes for each client, leading to cross-domain performance gaps and disparities for clients with varied data distributions. To mitigate cross-domain feature representation variance, we introduce FedPLVM, which establishes variance-aware dual-level prototypes clustering and employs a novel $\alpha$-sparsity prototype loss. The dual-level prototypes clustering strategy creates local clustered prototypes based on private data features, then performs global prototypes clustering to reduce communication complexity and preserve local data privacy. The $\alpha$-sparsity prototype loss aligns samples from underrepresented domains, enhancing intra-class similarity and reducing inter-class similarity. Evaluations on Digit-5, Office-10, and DomainNet datasets demonstrate our method's superiority over existing approaches.

PDF Details DOI