# FFT-MoE: Efficient Federated Fine-Tuning for Foundation Models via Large-scale Sparse MoE under Heterogeneous Edge

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18663 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18663/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Federated mixture-of-experts, one of 12 directions in Mixture-of-experts.
- Builds on 7 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Aug 2025.

## Placed in

- Mixture-of-experts / [Federated mixture-of-experts](https://mlsanity.com/moe/federated-mixture-of-experts/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [A Survey of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.18223/) (2023)
- [Automated Federated Pipeline for Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06448/) (2024)
- [FedMoE: Personalized Federated Learning via Heterogeneous Mixture of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11304/) (2024)
- [FeDeRA:Efficient Fine-tuning of Language Models in Federated Learning Leveraging Weight Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18848/) (2024)
- [FedMoE-DA: Federated Mixture of Experts via Domain Aware Fine-grained Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02115/) (2024)
- [Resource-Efficient Federated Fine-Tuning Large Language Models for Heterogeneous Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21213/) (2025)
- [Scalable Artificial Intelligence for Science: Perspectives, Methods and Exemplars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17812/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [HFedMoE: Resource-aware Heterogeneous Federated Learning with Mixture-of-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.00583/) (2026)
- [Aggregation Alignment for Federated Learning with Mixture-of-Experts under Data Heterogeneity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.21276/) (2026)
- [Wireless Federated Multi-Task LLM Fine-Tuning via Sparse-and-Orthogonal LoRA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.20492/) (2026)
- [OvA-LP: A Simple and Efficient Framework for Federated Learning on Non-IID Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.05028/) (2025)
- [Enhancing Cross-Problem Vehicle Routing via Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10652/) (2026)
- [Priority-Aware Learning-Unlearning Correction for Dynamic Decentralized LoRA Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.22878/) (2026)
- [Task-Aware Federated Fine-Tuning for MoE-based Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.13395/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

As FMs drive progress toward Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), fine-tuning them under privacy and resource constraints has become increasingly critical particularly when highquality training data resides on distributed edge devices. Federated Learning (FL) offers a compelling solution through Federated Fine-Tuning (FFT), which enables collaborative model adaptation without sharing raw data. Recent approaches incorporate Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) techniques such as Low Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to reduce computational overhead. However, LoRA-based FFT faces two major limitations in heterogeneous FL environments: structural incompatibility across clients with varying LoRA configurations and limited adaptability to non-IID data distributions, which hinders convergence and generalization. To address these challenges, we propose FFT MoE, a novel FFT framework that replaces LoRA with sparse Mixture of Experts (MoE) adapters. Each client trains a lightweight gating network to selectively activate a personalized subset of experts, enabling fine-grained adaptation to local resource budgets while preserving aggregation compatibility. To further combat the expert load imbalance caused by device and data heterogeneity, we introduce a heterogeneity-aware auxiliary loss that dynamically regularizes the routing distribution to ensure expert diversity and balanced utilization. Extensive experiments spanning both IID and non-IID conditions demonstrate that FFT MoE consistently outperforms state of the art FFT baselines in generalization performance and training efficiency.