FEDPIT: Privacy-preserving and Few-shot Federated Instruction Tuning

Core Concepts

FEDPIT proposes a novel federated algorithm that leverages large language models' in-context learning capability to generate task-specific synthetic data for training autonomously, addressing challenges in privacy preservation and data scarcity in federated instruction tuning.

Abstract

FEDPIT introduces a novel approach to enhance federated few-shot performance while preserving privacy. The method utilizes parameter-isolated training and self-generated synthetic data to improve model performance and defend against training data extraction attacks. Extensive experiments on real-world medical data demonstrate the effectiveness of FEDPIT.

Instruction tuning is crucial for large language models (LLMs) to generate human-aligned responses. However, collecting diverse, high-quality instruction data poses challenges, especially in privacy-sensitive domains. Federated instruction tuning (FEDIT) leverages federated learning for collaborative training from multiple data owners while preserving privacy. Challenges include limited instruction data and vulnerabilities to training data extraction attacks.

To address these issues, FEDPIT proposes a novel federated algorithm that utilizes LLMs' in-context learning capability to self-generate task-specific synthetic data for training autonomously. The method employs parameter-isolated training to maintain global parameters trained on synthetic data and local parameters trained on augmented local data, effectively thwarting data extraction attacks.

Extensive experiments on real-world medical data demonstrate the effectiveness of FEDPIT in improving federated few-shot performance while preserving privacy and robustness against data heterogeneity.

Stats

"Local devices may hold few-shot instructed instances (total less than 200)"
"The lack of sufficient instruction data leads to unsatisfying performance"
"Attacks can efficiently extract training data by querying learned LLMs without prior knowledge"

Quotes

"Instruction tuning has proven essential for enhancing the performance of large language models in generating human-aligned responses."
"Federated instruction tuning exchanges model parameters rather than revealing private data among distributed owners during instruction tuning."

Key Insights Distilled From

FedPIT

by Zhuo Zhang,J... at arxiv.org 03-12-2024

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2403.06131.pdf

Deeper Inquiries

How can FEDPIT's approach be applied to other domains beyond medical data?

FEDPIT's approach of leveraging LLMs' in-context learning capability to generate task-specific synthetic data can be extended to various domains beyond medical data. For example:

Legal Industry: In the legal domain, FEDPIT could be used for privacy-preserving instruction tuning for legal language models. It could help law firms and legal professionals fine-tune LLMs without sharing sensitive case information.
Finance Sector: Financial institutions could benefit from FEDPIT by using it for federated instruction tuning on financial text data while maintaining client confidentiality and regulatory compliance.
Customer Service: Companies in customer service industries can utilize FEDPIT to enhance their chatbots or virtual assistants with personalized responses based on user instructions.

By adapting the self-generation and parameter-isolated training techniques of FEDPIT, organizations across various sectors can improve model performance while safeguarding privacy-sensitive information.

What are potential drawbacks or limitations of using synthetic data generated by LLMs for training?

While using synthetic data generated by LLMs offers several advantages, there are also potential drawbacks and limitations to consider:

Quality Control: The quality of the synthetic data heavily relies on the initial input provided to the model during generation. If the input is biased or inaccurate, it may lead to poor-quality synthetic examples.
Generalization Issues: Synthetic data may not fully capture all nuances present in real-world datasets, leading to challenges in generalizing model performance outside of the synthesized context.
Overfitting Risk: Depending solely on synthetic data without a diverse range of real-world examples may increase the risk of overfitting models to specific patterns present only in the generated samples.
Ethical Concerns: There might be ethical considerations regarding using artificially created content that resembles real human-generated text too closely.

Addressing these limitations requires careful validation processes, continuous monitoring of model outputs, and a balanced mix of synthetic and authentic training instances.

How might advancements in large language models impact the effectiveness of FEDPIT over time?

Advancements in large language models (LLMs) could significantly impact the effectiveness of FEDPIT over time:

Improved Data Generation - Enhanced capabilities within future LLM iterations may lead to more accurate and diverse synthesis when generating new instructions and responses during self-generation steps.
Better Privacy Protection - Advanced privacy-preserving techniques integrated into newer LLM versions could strengthen security measures against potential attacks like training data extraction attempts encountered by federated learning systems like FEDIT.
Enhanced Performance - As large language models continue evolving with better architectures and optimization strategies, they may offer superior few-shot learning abilities that further boost federated instruction tuning outcomes under frameworks like FEDPIT.

Overall, ongoing advancements in large language models are likely to augment both efficiency and efficacy aspects within Federated Instruction Tuning methodologies such as FEDPIT as these technologies progress further into future iterations.