Federated Intelligence: When Large AI Models Meet Federated Fine-Tuning and Collaborative Reasoning at the Network Edge

Abstract: Large AI models exhibit remarkable capabilities in various application scenarios, but deploying them at the network edge poses significant challenges due to issues such as data privacy, computational resources, and latency. In this paper, we explore federated fine-tuning and collaborative reasoning techniques to facilitate the implementation of large AI models in resource-constrained wireless networks. Firstly, promising applications of large AI models within specific domains are discussed. Subsequently, federated fine-tuning methods are proposed to adapt large AI models to specific tasks or environments at the network edge, effectively addressing the challenges associated with communication overhead and enhancing communication efficiency. These methodologies follow clustered, hierarchical, and asynchronous paradigms to effectively tackle privacy issues and eliminate data silos. Furthermore, to enhance operational efficiency and reduce latency, efficient frameworks for model collaborative reasoning are developed, which include decentralized horizontal collaboration, cloud-edge-end vertical collaboration, and multi-access collaboration. Next, simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods in reducing the fine-tuning loss of large AI models across various downstream tasks. Finally, several open challenges and research opportunities are outlined.