FDAPT: Federated Domain-adaptive Pre-training for Language Models

Combining Domain-adaptive Pre-training (DAPT) with Federated Learning (FL) can enhance model adaptation by leveraging more sensitive and distributed data while preserving data privacy. However, few studies have focused on this method. Therefore, we conduct the first comprehensive empirical study to evaluate the performance of Federated Domain-adaptive Pre-training (FDAPT). We demonstrate that FDAPT can maintain competitive downstream task performance to the centralized baseline in both IID and non-IID situations. Furthermore, we propose a novel algorithm, Frozen Federated Domain-adaptive Pre-training (FFDAPT). FFDAPT improves the computational efficiency by 12.1% on average and exhibits similar downstream task performance to standard FDAPT, with general performance fluctuations remaining less than 1%. Finally, through a critical evaluation of our work, we identify promising future research directions for this new research area.