Foundation models (FMs) have shown prominent success in a wide range of tasks. Their applicability to specific domain-task pairings relies on the availability of, both, high-quality data and significant computational resources. These challenges are not new to the field and, indeed, Federated Learning (FL) has been shown to be a promising solution in similar setups. This paper tackles the specific case of Domain-Adaptive Pre-Training (DAPT), a key step in the application of FMs. We conduct the first comprehensive empirical study to evaluate the performance of Federated Domain-Adaptive Pre-Training (FDAPT). We demonstrate that FDAPT can maintain competitive downstream task performance to the centralized baseline in both IID and non-IID situations. Finally, we propose a novel algorithm, Frozen Federated Domain-Adaptive Pre-Training (FFDAPT). FFDAPT improves the computational efficiency by 12.1% on average and exhibits similar downstream task performance to vanilla FDAPT, with general performance fluctuations remaining less than 1%.
@article{arxiv.2307.06933,
title = {FDAPT: Federated Domain-adaptive Pre-training for Language Models},
author = {Lekang Jiang and Filip Svoboda and Nicholas D. Lane},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2307.06933},
year = {2023}
}
Comments
Accepted at International Workshop on Federated Learning in the Age of Foundation Models in Conjunction with NeurIPS 2023