cs.LGSep 26, 2026

What Should Federated LoRA Share? FedSAIL via Input-aware Subspace Alignment

Authors: Junye Du, Shuaida He, Long Feng

Organizations: School of Computing & Data Science The University of Hong Kong

Abstract

Federated low-rank adaptation (LoRA) requires identifying an update structure that is shared across heterogeneous clients. Prior work reports strong similarity among trained LoRA projection matrices across clients; however, such agreement may be largely induced by common initialization and collapses toward random overlap under independent initialization. More crucially, relying solely on parameter similarity inherently ignores the influence of local input regime. To uncover a more robust shared structure, we introduce an input-aware action matrix that weights the adapter update by the second-moment statistics of local layer inputs. Empirically, while parameter similarity vanishes, the leading right singular directions of this action matrix remain strongly aligned across clients. This shared geometry preserves task-conditioned differences and naturally varies across network depths. Motivated by these findings, we propose Federated Subspace-Guided Action-Informed Learning (FedSAIL). Instead of averaging weights, FedSAIL estimates a shared action subspace to regularize local training while preserving client-specific coefficients. Across several benchmarks, our approach consistently improves predictive performance over competing federated LoRA methods while reducing communication cost significantly.

Figures & tables

Appendix figures & tables16 assets

Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.

Appendix

Explore similar work

CardsList
  1. Rethinking Factor Sharing in Federated LoRA: A Rank-Aware Adaptive Approach

    Aug 10, 2026Xinyi Xu, Bingnan Xiao, Shuang Qin +2LLM Fine-TuningLow-Rank Adaptation

  2. Subspace-Constrained Federated Learning with Low-Rank Adaptation

    Jun 21, 2026Neranjan Senarath, Rohit Muralitharan, Sadia AsifFederated Learning AggregationNon-IID Federated Learning