# Federated Learning in Big Model Era: Domain-Specific Multimodal Large Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.11217 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11217/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Aug 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.05629/) (2016)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [PaLM-E: An Embodied Multimodal Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03378/) (2023)
- [Align before Fuse: Vision and Language Representation Learning with Momentum Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07651/) (2021)
- [OFA: Unifying Architectures, Tasks, and Modalities Through a Simple Sequence-to-Sequence Learning Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03052/) (2022)
- [Asynchronous Federated Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.03934/) (2019)
- [Understanding Robustness of Transformers for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14586/) (2021)
- [Experience Grounds Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10151/) (2020)
- [X-LLM: Bootstrapping Advanced Large Language Models by Treating Multi-Modalities as Foreign Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04160/) (2023)
- [Rethinking Architecture Design for Tackling Data Heterogeneity in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06047/) (2021)
- [Explaining Time Series Predictions with Dynamic Masks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05303/) (2021)
- [Detecting Everything in the Open World: Towards Universal Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11749/) (2023)
- [UnIVAL: Unified Model for Image, Video, Audio and Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16184/) (2023)
- [The Prospect of Enhancing Large-Scale Heterogeneous Federated Learning with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03945/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multimodal data, which can comprehensively perceive and recognize the physical world, has become an essential path towards general artificial intelligence. However, multimodal large models trained on public datasets often underperform in specific industrial domains. This paper proposes a multimodal federated learning framework that enables multiple enterprises to utilize private domain data to collaboratively train large models for vertical domains, achieving intelligent services across scenarios. The authors discuss in-depth the strategic transformation of federated learning in terms of intelligence foundation and objectives in the era of big model, as well as the new challenges faced in heterogeneous data, model aggregation, performance and cost trade-off, data privacy, and incentive mechanism. The paper elaborates a case study of leading enterprises contributing multimodal data and expert knowledge to city safety operation management , including distributed deployment and efficient coordination of the federated learning platform, technical innovations on data quality improvement based on large model capabilities and efficient joint fine-tuning approaches. Preliminary experiments show that enterprises can enhance and accumulate intelligent capabilities through multimodal model federated learning, thereby jointly creating an smart city model that provides high-quality intelligent services covering energy infrastructure safety, residential community security, and urban operation management. The established federated learning cooperation ecosystem is expected to further aggregate industry, academia, and research resources, realize large models in multiple vertical domains, and promote the large-scale industrial application of artificial intelligence and cutting-edge research on multimodal federated learning.