ROFED-LLM: Robust Federated Learning for Large Language Models in Adversarial Wireless Environments

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) have made significant advances in the field of natural language processing (NLP). However, their centralized training approach faces challenges related to data privacy, communication efficiency, and robustness against adversarial attacks, particularly in wireless environments. With the gradual depletion of high-quality public data, there is an urgent need to leverage private data distributed across various parties. Although federated learning (FL) offers a privacy-preserving collaborative training paradigm, it struggles to meet the high computational demands of edge devices and remains vulnerable to adversarial attacks. This paper introduces <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">ROFED</small>-LLM, a novel framework for robust, privacy-preserving training of LLMs on decentralized private data over wireless networks. By integrating split federated learning, which partitions the model across devices to enhance privacy, with adaptive jamming defense mechanisms, <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">ROFED</small>-LLM enables collaborative LLM training without raw data sharing while ensuring resilience against wireless adversarial attacks. Our multi-modal defense strategy combines model-level protections, such as differential privacy and dynamic pruning, with communication-level safeguards, including adaptive beamforming which optimizes wireless signal transmission to mitigate interference, and resource allocation optimization. Extensive experiments across diverse NLP tasks demonstrate <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">ROFED</small>-LLM's superiority, achieving a 12.87% improvement in privacy preservation and 18.26% enhancement in jamming resilience compared to existing methods such as FedAvg and SCAFFOLD, with only a marginal 3.94% trade-off in model accuracy. Our code repository has been open sourced at <uri xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://anonymous.4open.science/r/RoFed-LLM-54E1</uri>.

Topics & Concepts