A comprehensive survey of federated prompt learning (FPL) is presented to review recent advances in integrating the federated learning paradigm and large language models, while discussing security, privacy, and robustness issues and summarizing existing defense mechanisms.
Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) have become core components of cloud-based intelligent services in academia and industry, yet their training and deployment are hindered by high computational costs, data centralization, and privacy concerns. Federated learning (FL) offers a decentralized training paradigm that enables clients to collaboratively train a learning model without sharing raw data, making it a promising solution for privacy-preserving LLM training and reasoning. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of federated prompt learning (FPL) to review recent advances in integrating the federated learning paradigm and large language models, answering the following research questions: RQ1: The fundamental motivations, characteristics, and enabling technologies of FPL, and how it differs from conventional FL and full-model federated fine-tuning; RQ2: The trade-offs FPL approaches exhibit in performance, communication efficiency, computational overhead, scalability, personalization, and heterogeneity handling; RQ3: The remaining security, privacy, robustness, and system challenges, along with key future research directions. To this end, we systematically examine existing FPL methods across the full model lifecycle: pre-training, fine-tuning, and practical applications, while discussing security, privacy, and robustness issues and summarizing existing defense mechanisms. Finally, we highlight open challenges and future directions, aiming to help readers understand how the insights drive research in FPL.
A review of federated learning through a structured taxonomy that covers its core architectural paradigms, major learning types, model training approaches, and aggregation mechanisms, and analyzes the principal challenges confronting FL, including privacy and security risks, statistical and system heterogeneity, communication constraints, and global model divergence.
Mahdiyeh Velaei, Hosna Ghahramani, Ali Ghaffari et al.· Cluster Computing· 0 citations
Anomaly detection plays a pivotal role in ensuring the reliability of modern large-scale distributed systems. However, traditional log anomaly detection systems are centralized, which poses the risk of privacy leakage during data transmission. Previous research mainly focuses on single-domain logs,requiring domain-specific models and retraining, which limits flexibility and scalability. Significant advancements have been made by Large Language Models (LLMs) in the domains of natural language understanding and automated content creation. However,they still face persistent problems, including substantial computational costs and inadequate availability of training data. The combination of Federated Learning (FL) and LLMs (federated LLMs) offers a solution by leveraging distributed data while protecting privacy, which positions it as an ideal choice for sensitive domains. In this paper, we propose a unified online log anomaly detection framework, FLMLog, which is based on federated Learning and large language model. To enhance the operational efficiency, the FLMLog framework adopts a prefix-aware in-context learning (ICL) refinement strategy. This strategy is specifically designed to refine both the selection of in-context examples and the per-mutation order of these examples, thereby achieving an improvement in prefix caching efficiency. Our experiments demonstrate that the FLMLog framework is rigorously evaluated on five publicly available production log datasets, and the results show that it achieves superior comprehen-sive performance, outperforming state-of-the-art methods in F1-score on four out of five datasets with remarkable improvements.
Shuai Xu· Poster Volume 0008 The 2026...· 0 citations
Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative model training without centralizing raw data, but building and operating FL systems remains difficult due to distributed execution, rapidly evolving frameworks, and privacy and governance requirements. In this paper, we present an empirical study of FL developer challenges by independently analyzing 495 Stack Overflow posts and 9,116 GitHub issues and pull requests from 92 FL-related projects. Using BERTopic-based topic modeling and difficulty indicators such as unresolved rates and median resolution time, we characterize recurring problem areas and compare how they manifest across the two support platforms, Stack Overflow and GitHub. Our analysis surfaces nine dominant Stack Overflow topics and thirteen GitHub topics, with persistent difficulties concentrated in environment setup and dependency compatibility, API breakages and migration, training instability under non-IID data, evaluation and metric correctness, and the integration of privacy-preserving mechanisms. We also categorize posts by question intent to understand the kinds of help developers seek; this intent analysis shows that"How"-type questions dominate, reflecting strong demand for procedural guidance. Several topics, such as"TFF Installation and Environment Compatibility"and"Federated Feature Engineering and SecureBoost Issues,"exhibit high unresolved rates and long resolution times, suggesting shortcomings in tooling, documentation, and debugging support. Based on these findings, we provide actionable implications for FL framework designers, documentation authors, and educators. Although our results are constrained to public discussions and a subset of widely discussed frameworks, the study offers a scalable method for continuously monitoring developer pain points and improving the usability, reliability, and deployability of FL systems.
Healthcare organizations often cannot freely centralize patient data because medical records are sensitive, regulated, and institutionally controlled. Federated learning offers a practical alternative by allowing hospitals and clinics to train a shared model while keeping raw data local. However, federated learning is not automatically production-ready or private by default. Model updates can still leak information, and decentralized training introduces operational challenges in deployment, monitoring, rollback, debugging, and governance. This paper examines how MLOps practices and the emerging idea of Federated Learning Operations (FLOps) can make federated healthcare machine learning systems scalable, reliable, and trustworthy. It answers three research questions: how containerization and orchestration support federated deployment, how privacy-preserving mechanisms affect trade-offs among privacy, utility, scalability, and operational complexity, and which post-deployment practices are most important for long-term governance. The central argument is that federated healthcare ML requires more than privacy-preserving algorithms. It needs an integrated MLOps architecture that combines reproducible deployment, secure orchestration, model versioning, audit logging, drift monitoring, heterogeneity management, and clear governance.