Graph Representation Learning Augmented Model Manipulation on Federated Fine-Tuning of LLMs
For federated learning practitioners, this work highlights a novel and effective attack vector against LLM fine-tuning, though it is an incremental contribution as it adapts existing manipulation concepts to a specific setting.
The paper proposes AugMP, a graph representation learning-based attack strategy for federated fine-tuning of LLMs that generates malicious updates to degrade global model accuracy by up to 26% while evading common defenses.
Federated fine-tuning (FFT) has emerged as a privacy-preserving paradigm for collaboratively adapting large language models (LLMs). Built upon federated learning, FFT enables distributed agents to jointly refine a shared pretrained LLM by aggregating local LLM updates without sharing local raw data. However, FFT-based LLMs remain vulnerable to model manipulation threats, in which adversarial participants upload manipulated LLM updates that corrupt the aggregation process and degrade the performance of the global LLM. In this paper, we propose an Augmented Model maniPulation (AugMP) strategy against FFT-based LLMs. Specifically, we design a novel graph representation learning framework that captures feature correlations among benign LLM updates to guide the generation of malicious updates. To enhance manipulation effectiveness and stealthiness, we develop an iterative manipulation algorithm based on an augmented Lagrangian dual formulation. Through this formulation, malicious updates are optimized to embed adversarial objectives while preserving benign-like parameter characteristics. Experimental results across multiple LLM backbones demonstrate that the AugMP strategy achieves the strongest manipulation performance among all competing baselines, reducing the global LLM accuracy by up to 26% and degrading the average accuracy of local LLM agents by up to 22%. Meanwhile, AugMP maintains high statistical and geometric consistency with benign updates, enabling it to evade conventional distance- and similarity-based defense methods.