AFLoRA: Adaptive Federated Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models with Resource-Aware Low-Rank Adaption

Federated fine-tuning has emerged as a promising approach to adapt foundation models to downstream tasks using decentralized data. However, real-world deployment remains challenging due to the high computational and communication demands of fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) on clients with data and system resources that are heterogeneous and constrained. In such settings, the global model's performance is often bottlenecked by the weakest clients and further degraded by the non-IID nature of local data. Although existing methods leverage parameter-efficient techniques such as Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to reduce communication and computation overhead, they often fail to simultaneously ensure accurate aggregation of low-rank updates and maintain low system costs, thereby hindering overall performance. To address these challenges, we propose AFLoRA, an adaptive and lightweight federated fine-tuning framework for LLMs. AFLoRA decouples shared and client-specific updates to reduce overhead and improve aggregation accuracy, incorporates diagonal matrix-based rank pruning to better utilize local resources, and employs rank-aware aggregation with public data refinement to strengthen generalization under data heterogeneity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AFLoRA outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both accuracy and efficiency, providing a practical solution for efficient LLM adaptation in heterogeneous environments in the real world.

Enhancing Network Management Using Code Generated by Large Language Models

Analyzing network topologies and communication graphs plays a crucial role in contemporary network management. However, the absence of a cohesive approach leads to a challenging learning curve, heightened errors, and inefficiencies. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to facilitate a natural-language-based network management experience, utilizing large language models (LLMs) to generate task-specific code from natural language queries. This method tackles the challenges of explainability, scalability, and privacy by allowing network operators to inspect the generated code, eliminating the need to share network data with LLMs, and concentrating on application-specific requests combined with general program synthesis techniques. We design and evaluate a prototype system using benchmark applications, showcasing high accuracy, cost-effectiveness, and the potential for further enhancements using complementary program synthesis techniques.