FLoRA: Enhancing Vision-Language Models with Parameter-Efficient Federated Learning

In the rapidly evolving field of artificial intelligence, multimodal models, e.g., integrating vision and language into visual-language models (VLMs), have become pivotal for many applications, ranging from image captioning to multimodal search engines. Among these models, the Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) model has demonstrated remarkable performance in understanding and generating nuanced relationships between text and images. However, the conventional training of such models often requires centralized aggregation of vast datasets, posing significant privacy and data governance challenges. To address these concerns, this paper proposes a novel approach that leverages Federated Learning and parameter-efficient adapters, i.e., Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), to train VLMs. This methodology preserves data privacy by training models across decentralized data sources and ensures model adaptability and efficiency through LoRA's parameter-efficient fine-tuning. Our approach accelerates training time by up to 34.72 times and requires 2.47 times less memory usage than full fine-tuning.