Towards the Next Frontier of LLMs, Training on Private Data: A Cross-Domain Benchmark for Federated Fine-Tuning

The recent success of large language models (LLMs) has been largely driven by vast public datasets. However, the next frontier for LLM development lies beyond public data. Much of the world's most valuable information is private, especially in highly regulated sectors such as healthcare and finance, where data include patient histories or customer communications. Unlocking this data could represent a major leap forward, enabling LLMs with deeper domain expertise and stronger real-world utility. Yet, these data cannot be shared because they are distributed across institutions and constrained by privacy, regulatory, and organizational barriers. Moreover, institutional datasets are typically non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID), differing across sites in population characteristics, data modalities, documentation patterns, and task-specific label distributions. In this paper, we demonstrate a practical approach to unlocking private and distributed institutional data for LLM adaptation through federated collaboration across data silos. Built on the Sherpa.ai Federated Learning platform, our framework enables nodes to jointly fine-tune a shared LLM without exchanging private data. We evaluate this approach through a cross-domain benchmark in healthcare and finance, using four closed-ended question answering and classification datasets: MedQA, MedMCQA, FPB, and FiQA-SA. We compare three parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) strategies-LoRA, QLoRA, and IA3-across pretrained backbones under non-IID settings reflecting institutional data heterogeneity. Our results show that federated fine-tuning performs close to centralized training and outperforms isolated single-institution learning. From a Green AI perspective, QLoRA and IA3 improve efficiency with limited accuracy degradation, supporting federated PEFT as a viable approach for adapting LLMs where data cannot be shared.

Sherpa.ai Privacy-Preserving Multi-Party Entity Alignment without Intersection Disclosure for Noisy Identifiers

Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative model training among multiple parties without centralizing raw data. There are two main paradigms in FL: Horizontal FL (HFL), where all participants share the same feature space but hold different samples, and Vertical FL (VFL), where parties possess complementary features for the same set of samples. A prerequisite for VFL training is privacy-preserving entity alignment (PPEA), which establishes a common index of samples across parties (alignment) without revealing which samples are shared between them. Conventional private set intersection (PSI) achieves alignment but leaks intersection membership, exposing sensitive relationships between datasets. The standard private set union (PSU) mitigates this risk by aligning on the union of identifiers rather than the intersection. However, existing approaches are often limited to two parties or lack support for typo-tolerant matching. In this paper, we introduce the Sherpa.ai multi-party PSU protocol for VFL, a PPEA method that hides intersection membership and enables both exact and noisy matching. The protocol generalizes two-party approaches to multiple parties with low communication overhead and offers two variants: an order-preserving version for exact alignment and an unordered version tolerant to typographical and formatting discrepancies. We prove correctness and privacy, analyze communication and computational (exponentiation) complexity, and formalize a universal index mapping from local records to a shared index space. This multi-party PSU offers a scalable, mathematically grounded protocol for PPEA in real-world VFL deployments, such as multi-institutional healthcare disease detection, collaborative risk modeling between banks and insurers, and cross-domain fraud detection between telecommunications and financial institutions, while preserving intersection privacy.

Training Together, Diagnosing Better: Federated Learning for Collagen VI-Related Dystrophies

The application of Machine Learning (ML) to the diagnosis of rare diseases, such as collagen VI-related dystrophies (COL6-RD), is fundamentally limited by the scarcity and fragmentation of available data. Attempts to expand sampling across hospitals, institutions, or countries with differing regulations face severe privacy, regulatory, and logistical obstacles that are often difficult to overcome. The Federated Learning (FL) provides a promising solution by enabling collaborative model training across decentralized datasets while keeping patient data local and private. Here, we report a novel global FL initiative using the Sherpa.ai FL platform, which leverages FL across distributed datasets in two international organizations for the diagnosis of COL6-RD, using collagen VI immunofluorescence microscopy images from patient-derived fibroblast cultures. Our solution resulted in an ML model capable of classifying collagen VI patient images into the three primary pathogenic mechanism groups associated with COL6-RD: exon skipping, glycine substitution, and pseudoexon insertion. This new approach achieved an F1-score of 0.82, outperforming single-organization models (0.57-0.75). These results demonstrate that FL substantially improves diagnostic utility and generalizability compared to isolated institutional models. Beyond enabling more accurate diagnosis, we anticipate that this approach will support the interpretation of variants of uncertain significance and guide the prioritization of sequencing strategies to identify novel pathogenic variants.

Federated Learning for Pediatric Pneumonia Detection: Enabling Collaborative Diagnosis Without Sharing Patient Data

Early and accurate pneumonia detection from chest X-rays (CXRs) is clinically critical to expedite treatment and isolation, reduce complications, and curb unnecessary antibiotic use. Although artificial intelligence (AI) substantially improves CXR-based detection, development is hindered by globally distributed data, high inter-hospital variability, and strict privacy regulations (e.g., HIPAA, GDPR) that make centralization impractical. These constraints are compounded by heterogeneous imaging protocols, uneven data availability, and the costs of transferring large medical images across geographically dispersed sites. In this paper, we evaluate Federated Learning (FL) using the Sherpa.ai FL platform, enabling multiple hospitals (nodes) to collaboratively train a CXR classifier for pneumonia while keeping data in place and private. Using the Pediatric Pneumonia Chest X-ray dataset, we simulate cross-hospital collaboration with non-independent and non-identically distributed (non-IID) data, reproducing real-world variability across institutions and jurisdictions. Our experiments demonstrate that collaborative and privacy-preserving training across multiple hospitals via FL led to a dramatic performance improvement achieving 0.900 Accuracy and 0.966 ROC-AUC, corresponding to 47.5% and 50.0% gains over single-hospital models (0.610; 0.644), without transferring any patient CXR. These results indicate that FL delivers high-performing, generalizable, secure and private pneumonia detection across healthcare networks, with data kept local. This is especially relevant for rare diseases, where FL enables secure multi-institutional collaboration without data movement, representing a breakthrough for accelerating diagnosis and treatment development in low-data domains.