# FedEval-LLM: Federated Evaluation of Large Language Models on Downstream Tasks with Collective Wisdom

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.12273 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12273/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Apr 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [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)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.05629/) (2016)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [Learning to summarize from human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.01325/) (2020)
- [A Survey of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.18223/) (2023)
- [G-Eval: NLG Evaluation using GPT-4 with Better Human Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16634/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Evaluation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03109/) (2023)
- [BloombergGPT: A Large Language Model for Finance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17564/) (2023)
- [GLM-130B: An Open Bilingual Pre-trained Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02414/) (2022)
- [AGIEval: A Human-Centric Benchmark for Evaluating Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06364/) (2023)
- [C-Eval: A Multi-Level Multi-Discipline Chinese Evaluation Suite for Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08322/) (2023)
- [P-Tuning v2: Prompt Tuning Can Be Comparable to Fine-tuning Universally Across Scales and Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07602/) (2021)
- [How Close is ChatGPT to Human Experts? Comparison Corpus, Evaluation, and Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07597/) (2023)
- [Is ChatGPT a Good NLG Evaluator? A Preliminary Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04048/) (2023)
- [TALLRec: An Effective and Efficient Tuning Framework to Align Large Language Model with Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.00447/) (2023)
- [PandaLM: An Automatic Evaluation Benchmark for LLM Instruction Tuning Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05087/) (2023)
- [Towards Building the Federated GPT: Federated Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05644/) (2023)
- [Delta Tuning: A Comprehensive Study of Parameter Efficient Methods for Pre-trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06904/) (2022)
- [Threats to Federated Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.02133/) (2020)
- [HuaTuo: Tuning LLaMA Model with Chinese Medical Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06975/) (2023)
- [Chatlaw: A Multi-Agent Legal Assistant based on a Role-Aligned Mixture-of-Experts Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16092/) (2023)
- [Exploring the Impact of Instruction Data Scaling on Large Language Models: An Empirical Study on Real-World Use Cases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14742/) (2023)
- [Recovering Private Text in Federated Learning of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.08514/) (2022)
- [FATE-LLM: A Industrial Grade Federated Learning Framework for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10049/) (2023)
- [Structured information extraction from complex scientific text with fine-tuned large language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05238/) (2022)
- [LAMP: Extracting Text from Gradients with Language Model Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.08827/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [LLMs-as-Judges: A Comprehensive Survey on LLM-based Evaluation Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05579/) (2024)
- [LLM Post-Training: A Deep Dive into Reasoning Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.21321/) (2025)
- [Federated Agent Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.01195/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a promising solution for collaborative training of large language models (LLMs). However, the integration of LLMs into FL introduces new challenges, particularly concerning the evaluation of LLMs. Traditional evaluation methods that rely on labeled test sets and similarity-based metrics cover only a subset of the acceptable answers, thereby failing to accurately reflect the performance of LLMs on generative tasks. Meanwhile, although automatic evaluation methods that leverage advanced LLMs present potential, they face critical risks of data leakage due to the need to transmit data to external servers and suboptimal performance on downstream tasks due to the lack of domain knowledge. To address these issues, we propose a Federated Evaluation framework of Large Language Models, named FedEval-LLM, that provides reliable performance measurements of LLMs on downstream tasks without the reliance on labeled test sets and external tools, thus ensuring strong privacy-preserving capability. FedEval-LLM leverages a consortium of personalized LLMs from participants as referees to provide domain knowledge and collective evaluation capability, thus aligning to the respective downstream tasks and mitigating uncertainties and biases associated with a single referee. Experimental results demonstrate a significant improvement in the evaluation capability of personalized evaluation models on downstream tasks. When applied to FL, these evaluation models exhibit strong agreement with human preference and RougeL-score on meticulously curated test sets. FedEval-LLM effectively overcomes the limitations of traditional metrics and the reliance on external services, making it a promising framework for the evaluation of LLMs within collaborative training scenarios.