Tootfinder

FLoRIST: Singular Value Thresholding for Efficient and Accurate Federated Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models
Hariharan Ramesh, Jyotikrishna Dass
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.09199

FLoRIST: Singular Value Thresholding for Efficient and Accurate Federated Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models
Integrating Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) into federated learning offers a promising solution for parameter-efficient fine-tuning of Large Language Models (LLMs) without sharing local data. However, several methods designed for federated LoRA present significant challenges in balancing communication efficiency, model accuracy, and computational cost, particularly among heterogeneous clients. These methods either rely on simplistic averaging of local adapters, which introduces aggregation noise, re…

Once the NFL's most intimidating defender, James Harrison isn't the James Harrison you remember https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6344442/2025/06/12/james-harrison-steelers-fatherhood/

Beyond Personalization: Federated Recommendation with Calibration via Low-rank Decomposition
Jundong Chen, Honglei Zhang, Haoxuan Li, Chunxu Zhang, Zhiwei Li, Yidong Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.09525

Beyond Personalization: Federated Recommendation with Calibration via Low-rank Decomposition
Federated recommendation (FR) is a promising paradigm to protect user privacy in recommender systems. Distinct from general federated scenarios, FR inherently needs to preserve client-specific parameters, i.e., user embeddings, for privacy and personalization. However, we empirically find that globally aggregated item embeddings can induce skew in user embeddings, resulting in suboptimal performance. To this end, we theoretically analyze the user embedding skew issue and propose Personalized Fe…

Introducing FAIR: A federated approach to strengthen the WordPress ecosystem;
A new community-led initiative to extend WordPress distribution beyond a single point of control. @…

Introducing FAIR: A federated approach to strengthen the WordPress ecosystem | We Love Open Source - All Things Open
Last week, at AltCtrl.org, a community gathering focused on the open web, a large group of contributors from the WordPress Ecosystem introduced FAIR, a new federated approach to plugin and... Read More

Open repos & AI bots
#FederatedMemory
https://coar-repositories.org/news-updates/open-repositories-are-being-profoundly-impacted-by-ai-bots-and-other-crawlers-results-of-a-coar-survey/
and https://codeberg.org/forgejo/discussions/issues/339

Federated Learning within Global Energy Budget over Heterogeneous Edge Accelerators
Roopkatha Banerjee, Tejus Chandrashekar, Ananth Eswar, Yogesh Simmhan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10413

Federated Learning within Global Energy Budget over Heterogeneous Edge Accelerators
Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative model training across distributed clients while preserving data privacy. However, optimizing both energy efficiency and model accuracy remains a challenge, given device and data heterogeneity. Further, sustainable AI through a global energy budget for FL has not been explored. We propose a novel optimization problem for client selection in FL that maximizes the model accuracy within an overall energy limit and reduces training time. We solve this wi…

Digital rights organizations urge the FTC to investigate Character.AI and Meta's "unlicensed practice of medicine facilitated" by therapy AI chatbots (Samantha Cole/404 Media)
https://www.404media.co/ai-therapy-bots-meta-character-ai-ftc-comp…

AI Therapy Bots Are Conducting 'Illegal Behavior,' Digital Rights Organizations Say
Exclusive: An FTC complaint led by the Consumer Federation of America outlines how therapy bots on Meta and Character.AI have claimed to be qualified, licensed therapists to users, and why that may be breaking the law.

How climate change triggered a landslide tsunami
#FederatedMemory

Graph-based Gossiping for Communication Efficiency in Decentralized Federated Learning
Huong Nguyen, Hong-Tri Nguyen, Praveen Kumar Donta, Susanna Pirttikangas, Lauri Lov\'en
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10607

Graph-based Gossiping for Communication Efficiency in Decentralized Federated Learning
Federated learning has emerged as a privacy-preserving technique for collaborative model training across heterogeneously distributed silos. Yet, its reliance on a single central server introduces potential bottlenecks and risks of single-point failure. Decentralizing the server, often referred to as decentralized learning, addresses this problem by distributing the server role across nodes within the network. One drawback regarding this pure decentralization is it introduces communication ineff…

xAI apologizes for Grok's "horrific behavior" when it wrote antisemitic posts on July 8, and blames "an update to a code path upstream of the Grok bot" (Anthony Ha/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/12/xai-and-grok-apologize-for…

xAI and Grok apologize for ‘horrific behavior’ | TechCrunch
In a series of posts on X, the AI chatbot Grok apologized for what it admitted was “horrific behavior.” The posts appear to be an official statement from xAI, the Elon Musk-led company behind Grok, as opposed to an AI-generated explanation for Grok’s posts. (xAI recently acquired X, where Grok is prominently featured.)