Herbert Woisetschläger

Herbert Woisetschläger, Alexander Isenko, Shiqiang Wang et al.

Large Language Models (LLM) and foundation models are popular as they offer new opportunities for individuals and businesses to improve natural language processing, interact with data, and retrieve information faster. However, training or fine-tuning LLMs requires a vast amount of data, which can be challenging to access due to legal or technical restrictions and may require private computing resources. Federated Learning (FL) is a solution designed to overcome these challenges and expand data access for deep learning applications. This paper takes a hardware-centric approach to explore how LLMs can be brought to modern edge computing systems. Our study fine-tunes the FLAN-T5 model family, ranging from 80M to 3B parameters, using FL for a text summarization task. We provide a micro-level hardware benchmark, compare the model FLOP utilization to a state-of-the-art data center GPU, and study the network utilization in realistic conditions. Our contribution is twofold: First, we evaluate the current capabilities of edge computing systems and their potential for LLM FL workloads. Second, by comparing these systems with a data-center GPU, we demonstrate the potential for improvement and the next steps toward achieving greater computational efficiency at the edge.

Herbert Woisetschläger, Alexander Erben, Ruben Mayer et al.

Federated Learning (FL) has become a viable technique for realizing privacy-enhancing distributed deep learning on the network edge. Heterogeneous hardware, unreliable client devices, and energy constraints often characterize edge computing systems. In this paper, we propose FLEdge, which complements existing FL benchmarks by enabling a systematic evaluation of client capabilities. We focus on computational and communication bottlenecks, client behavior, and data security implications. Our experiments with models varying from 14K to 80M trainable parameters are carried out on dedicated hardware with emulated network characteristics and client behavior. We find that state-of-the-art embedded hardware has significant memory bottlenecks, leading to 4x longer processing times than on modern data center GPUs.

Herbert Woisetschläger, Simon Mertel, Christoph Krönke et al.

The European Union Artificial Intelligence Act mandates clear stakeholder responsibilities in developing and deploying machine learning applications to avoid substantial fines, prioritizing private and secure data processing with data remaining at its origin. Federated Learning (FL) enables the training of generative AI Models across data siloes, sharing only model parameters while improving data security. Since FL is a cooperative learning paradigm, clients and servers naturally share legal responsibility in the FL pipeline. Our work contributes to clarifying the roles of both parties, explains strategies for shifting responsibilities to the server operator, and points out open technical challenges that we must solve to improve FL's practical applicability under the EU AI Act.

Shiqiang Wang, Herbert Woisetschläger

Agentic artificial intelligence (AI) is a natural fit for Internet of Things (IoT) and edge systems, but edge deployments are often constrained to models around 8 billion parameters or smaller. An important question is: How much agentic-task quality is lost when model size is constrained by memory, power, and latency budgets? To address this question, in this paper, we provide an initial empirical study considering edge-focused model scaling, general-purpose versus coder-oriented model effects, and tool-enabled execution under a fixed protocol. We introduce a domain-conditioned evaluation methodology, an implementation-grounded analysis of model-tool interactions, practical guidance for model selection under constraints, and an analysis of failure modes that reveals distinct semantic versus execution failure patterns across model families. Our core finding is that edge-agent quality is not a simple function of parameter count. Robust deployment depends on the joint design of model choice and tool workflow. Domain-conditioned analysis reveals Pareto fronts in the accuracy-latency space that can guide strategy selection based on operational priorities.

Shiqiang Wang, Herbert Woisetschläger, Hans Arno Jacobsen et al.

Data is fundamental to large language models (LLMs). However, understanding of what makes certain data useful for different stages of an LLM workflow, including training, tuning, alignment, in-context learning, etc., and why, remains an open question. Current approaches rely heavily on extensive experimentation with large public datasets to obtain empirical heuristics for data filtering and dataset construction. These approaches are compute intensive and lack a principled way of understanding the essence of how specific data characteristics drive LLM behavior. In this position paper, we advocate for the need of developing systematic methodologies for generating synthetic sequences from appropriately defined random processes, with the goal that these sequences can reveal useful characteristics when they are used in one or multiple stages of the LLM workflow. We refer to such sequences as data probes. By observing LLM behavior on data probes, researchers can systematically conduct studies on how data characteristics influence model performance, generalization, and robustness. The probing sequences exhibit statistical properties that can be viewed using theoretical concepts, such as typical sets, which are generalized to describe the behaviors of LLMs. This data-probe approach provides a pathway for uncovering foundational insights into the role of data in LLM training and inference, beyond empirical heuristics.

Felix Mulitze, Herbert Woisetschläger, Hans Arno Jacobsen

The convergence of next-generation wireless systems and distributed Machine Learning (ML) demands Federated Learning (FL) methods that remain efficient and robust with wireless connected peers and under network churn. Peer-to-peer (P2P) FL removes the bottleneck of a central coordinator, but existing approaches suffer from excessive communication complexity, limiting their scalability in practice. We introduce MAR-FL, a novel P2P FL system that leverages iterative group-based aggregation to substantially reduce communication overhead while retaining resilience to churn. MAR-FL achieves communication costs that scale as O(N log N), contrasting with the O(N^2) complexity of previously existing baselines, and thereby maintains effectiveness especially as the number of peers in an aggregation round grows. The system is robust towards unreliable FL clients and can integrate private computing.

Herbert Woisetschläger, Alexander Isenko, Shiqiang Wang et al.

Federated Learning (FL) has become an established technique to facilitate privacy-preserving collaborative training across a multitude of clients. However, new approaches to FL often discuss their contributions involving small deep-learning models only and focus on training full models on clients. In the wake of Foundation Models (FM), the reality is different for many deep learning applications. Typically, FMs have already been pre-trained across a wide variety of tasks and can be fine-tuned to specific downstream tasks over significantly smaller datasets than required for full model training. However, access to such datasets is often challenging. By its design, FL can help to open data silos. With this survey, we introduce a novel taxonomy focused on computational and communication efficiency, the vital elements to make use of FMs in FL systems. We discuss the benefits and drawbacks of parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) for FL applications, elaborate on the readiness of FL frameworks to work with FMs, and provide future research opportunities on how to evaluate generative models in FL as well as the interplay of privacy and PEFT.

Herbert Woisetschläger, Alexander Erben, Bill Marino et al.

The age of AI regulation is upon us, with the European Union Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act) leading the way. Our key inquiry is how this will affect Federated Learning (FL), whose starting point of prioritizing data privacy while performing ML fundamentally differs from that of centralized learning. We believe the AI Act and future regulations could be the missing catalyst that pushes FL toward mainstream adoption. However, this can only occur if the FL community reprioritizes its research focus. In our position paper, we perform a first-of-its-kind interdisciplinary analysis (legal and ML) of the impact the AI Act may have on FL and make a series of observations supporting our primary position through quantitative and qualitative analysis. We explore data governance issues and the concern for privacy. We establish new challenges regarding performance and energy efficiency within lifecycle monitoring. Taken together, our analysis suggests there is a sizable opportunity for FL to become a crucial component of AI Act-compliant ML systems and for the new regulation to drive the adoption of FL techniques in general. Most noteworthy are the opportunities to defend against data bias and enhance private and secure computation

Daouda Sow, Herbert Woisetschläger, Saikiran Bulusu et al.

Pretraining large language models (LLMs) on vast and heterogeneous datasets is crucial for achieving state-of-the-art performance across diverse downstream tasks. However, current training paradigms treat all samples equally, overlooking the importance or relevance of individual samples throughout the training process. Existing reweighting strategies, which primarily focus on group-level data importance, fail to leverage fine-grained instance-level information and do not adapt dynamically to individual sample importance as training progresses. In this paper, we introduce novel algorithms for dynamic, instance-level data reweighting aimed at improving both the efficiency and effectiveness of LLM pretraining. Our methods adjust the weight of each training sample based on its loss value in an online fashion, allowing the model to dynamically focus on more informative or important samples at the current training stage. In particular, our framework allows us to systematically devise reweighting strategies deprioritizing redundant or uninformative data, which we find tend to work best. Furthermore, we develop a new theoretical framework for analyzing the impact of loss-based reweighting on the convergence of gradient-based optimization, providing the first formal characterization of how these strategies affect convergence bounds. We empirically validate our approach across a spectrum of tasks, from pretraining 7B and 1.4B parameter LLMs to smaller-scale language models and linear regression problems, demonstrating that our loss-based reweighting approach can lead to faster convergence and significantly improved performance.

Hajar Emami Gohari, Swanand Ravindra Kadhe, Syed Yousaf Shah et al.

Data quantity and quality play a vital role in determining the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs). High-quality data, in particular, can significantly boost the LLM's ability to generalize on a wide range of downstream tasks. Large pre-training datasets for leading LLMs remain inaccessible to the public, whereas many open datasets are small in size (less than 5 trillion tokens), limiting their suitability for training large models. In this paper, we introduce GneissWeb, a large dataset yielding around 10 trillion tokens that caters to the data quality and quantity requirements of training LLMs. Our GneissWeb recipe that produced the dataset consists of sharded exact sub-string deduplication and a judiciously constructed ensemble of quality filters. GneissWeb achieves a favorable trade-off between data quality and quantity, producing models that outperform models trained on state-of-the-art open large datasets (5+ trillion tokens). We show that models trained using GneissWeb dataset outperform those trained on FineWeb-V1.1.0 by 2.73 percentage points in terms of average score computed on a set of 11 commonly used benchmarks (both zero-shot and few-shot) for pre-training dataset evaluation. When the evaluation set is extended to 20 benchmarks (both zero-shot and few-shot), models trained using GneissWeb still achieve a 1.75 percentage points advantage over those trained on FineWeb-V1.1.0.

Ryan Zhang, Herbert Woisetschläger, Shiqiang Wang et al.

Open-weight large language model (LLM) zoos allow users to quickly integrate state-of-the-art models into systems. Despite increasing availability, selecting the most appropriate model for a given task still largely relies on public benchmark leaderboards and educated guesses. This can be unsatisfactory for both inference service providers and end users, where the providers usually prioritize cost efficiency, while the end users usually prioritize model output quality for their inference requests. In commercial settings, these two priorities are often brought together in Service Level Agreements (SLA). We present MESS+, an online stochastic optimization algorithm for energy-optimal model selection from a model zoo, which works on a per-inference-request basis. For a given SLA that requires high accuracy, we are up to 2.5x more energy efficient with MESS+ than with randomly selecting an LLM from the zoo while maintaining SLA quality constraints.