# FediLoRA: Practical Federated Fine-Tuning of Foundation Models Under Missing-Modality Constraints

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06984 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.06984/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.05629/) (2016)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00190/) (2021)
- [On the Convergence of FedAvg on Non-IID Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02189/) (2019)
- [Adaptive Federated Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00295/) (2020)
- [PixArt-α: Fast Training of Diffusion Transformer for Photorealistic Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00426/) (2023)
- [MedCLIP: Contrastive Learning from Unpaired Medical Images and Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10163/) (2022)
- [SLAKE: A Semantically-Labeled Knowledge-Enhanced Dataset for Medical Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09542/) (2021)
- [Towards Building the Federated GPT: Federated Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05644/) (2023)
- [Mixture of LoRA Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13628/) (2024)
- [Improving LoRA in Privacy-preserving Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12313/) (2024)
- [FederatedScope-LLM: A Comprehensive Package for Fine-tuning Large Language Models in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.00363/) (2023)
- [FLoRA: Federated Fine-Tuning Large Language Models with Heterogeneous Low-Rank Adaptations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.05976/) (2024)
- [Heterogeneous LoRA for Federated Fine-tuning of On-Device Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06432/) (2024)
- [Federated Fine-tuning of Large Language Models under Heterogeneous Tasks and Client Resources](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11505/) (2024)
- [Multimodal Federated Learning via Contrastive Representation Ensemble](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08888/) (2023)
- [Selective Aggregation for Low-Rank Adaptation in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.01463/) (2024)
- [FedAvg with Fine Tuning: Local Updates Lead to Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13692/) (2022)
- [Dual-Personalizing Adapter for Federated Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19211/) (2024)
- [FedMultimodal: A Benchmark For Multimodal Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09486/) (2023)
- [Differentially Private Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Model Using Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17493/) (2023)
- [LoRA-FAIR: Federated LoRA Fine-Tuning with Aggregation and Initialization Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.14961/) (2024)
- [Dynamic Prefix-Tuning for Generative Template-based Event Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.06166/) (2022)
- [FinVis-GPT: A Multimodal Large Language Model for Financial Chart Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01430/) (2023)
- [Multimodal Federated Learning with Missing Modality via Prototype Mask and Contrast](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13508/) (2023)
- [Towards Federated Low-Rank Adaptation of Language Models with Rank Heterogeneity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17477/) (2024)
- [Open-Vocabulary Federated Learning with Multimodal Prototyping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01232/) (2024)
- [MMiC: Mitigating Modality Incompleteness in Clustered Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.06911/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [MM-OpenFGL: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Multimodal Federated Graph Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.22416/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Federated Learning with LoRA fine-tuning offers an efficient and privacy-aware solution for institutions to collaboratively leverage their large datasets to train VLLMs. However, participating institutions often possess heterogeneous computational resources, resulting in imbalanced LoRA ranks, which pose a major challenge for effective collaboration. In addition, real-world applications in domains such as healthcare and transportation frequently suffer from missing modalities due to user mistakes or device failures, which significantly degrade global model performance in federated settings. To the best of our knowledge, no prior work has addressed these two challenges simultaneously in federated VLLMs. To tackle these issues, we propose FediLoRA, a lightweight federated LoRA aggregation framework that effectively mitigates the impact of missing modalities in heterogeneous environment. FediLoRA is explicitly motivated by the observation that simple averaging and structured editing can jointly benefit both global and personalized models. Our approach achieves strong performance across multiple general-domain and medical-domain benchmark datasets. Additional experiments on healthcare data further demonstrate that FediLoRA is well-suited for practical, real-world deployment scenarios. Our code is released at https://github.com/gotobcn8/FediLoRA.