# Worldwide Federated Training of Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.14446 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14446/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 62 of its 89 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 May 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 62)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.05629/) (2016)
- [Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08361/) (2020)
- [On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07258/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [Advances and Open Problems in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04977/) (2019)
- [Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15556/) (2022)
- [The Pile: An 800GB Dataset of Diverse Text for Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00027/) (2020)
- [BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05100/) (2022)
- [mT5: A massively multilingual pre-trained text-to-text transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11934/) (2020)
- [On Large-Batch Training for Deep Learning: Generalization Gap and Sharp Minima](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04836/) (2016)
- [ZeRO: Memory Optimizations Toward Training Trillion Parameter Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.02054/) (2019)
- [Federated Learning with Non-IID Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.00582/) (2018)
- [Adaptive Federated Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00295/) (2020)
- [On First-Order Meta-Learning Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02999/) (2018)
- [Towards Federated Learning at Scale: System Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.01046/) (2019)
- [PyTorch FSDP: Experiences on Scaling Fully Sharded Data Parallel](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11277/) (2023)
- [Local SGD Converges Fast and Communicates Little](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.09767/) (2018)
- [Federated Learning on Non-IID Data Silos: An Experimental Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02079/) (2021)
- [Federated Learning with Personalization Layers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.00818/) (2019)
- [Federated Learning with Differential Privacy: Algorithms and Performance Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00222/) (2019)
- [An Efficient Framework for Clustered Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04088/) (2020)
- [Clustered Federated Learning: Model-Agnostic Distributed Multi-Task Optimization under Privacy Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01991/) (2019)
- [Towards Personalized Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00710/) (2021)
- [Three Approaches for Personalization with Applications to Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10619/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Understanding Outer Optimizers in Local SGD: Learning Rates, Momentum, and Acceleration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.10439/) (2025)
- [Exploring Potential Prompt Injection Attacks in Federated Military LLMs and Their Mitigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.18416/) (2025)
- [A Survey on Foundation Models for Personalized Federated Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.06907/) (2025)
- [NoEsis: Differentially Private Knowledge Transfer in Modular LLM Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.18147/) (2025)
- [Task-Centric Personalized Federated Fine-Tuning of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.00050/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The reliance of language model training on massive amounts of computation and vast datasets scraped from potentially low-quality, copyrighted, or sensitive data has come into question practically, legally, and ethically. Federated learning provides a plausible alternative by enabling previously untapped data to be voluntarily gathered from collaborating organizations. However, when scaled globally, federated learning requires collaboration across heterogeneous legal, security, and privacy regimes while accounting for the inherent locality of language data; this further exacerbates the established challenge of federated statistical heterogeneity. We propose a Worldwide Federated Language Model Training~(WorldLM) system based on federations of federations, where each federation has the autonomy to account for factors such as its industry, operating jurisdiction, or competitive environment. WorldLM enables such autonomy in the presence of statistical heterogeneity via partial model localization by allowing sub-federations to attentively aggregate key layers from their constituents. Furthermore, it can adaptively share information across federations via residual layer embeddings. Evaluations of language modeling on naturally heterogeneous datasets show that WorldLM outperforms standard federations by up to 1.91×, approaches the personalized performance of fully local models, and maintains these advantages under privacy-enhancing techniques.