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Abstract
As large language models (LLMs) demonstrate unparalleled performance and
generalization ability, LLMs are widely used and integrated into various
applications. When it comes to sensitive domains, as commonly described in
federated learning scenarios, directly using external LLMs on private data is
strictly prohibited by stringent data security and privacy regulations. For
local clients, the utilization of LLMs to improve the domain-specific small
language models (SLMs), characterized by limited computational resources and
domain-specific data, has attracted considerable research attention. By
observing that LLMs can empower domain-specific SLMs, existing methods
predominantly concentrate on leveraging the public data or LLMs to generate
more data to transfer knowledge from LLMs to SLMs. However, due to the
discrepancies between LLMs' generated data and clients' domain-specific data,
these methods cannot yield substantial improvements in the domain-specific
tasks. In this paper, we introduce a Federated Domain-specific Knowledge
Transfer (FDKT) framework, which enables domain-specific knowledge transfer
from LLMs to SLMs while preserving clients' data privacy. The core insight is
to leverage LLMs to augment data based on domain-specific few-shot
demonstrations, which are synthesized from private domain data using
differential privacy. Such synthetic samples share similar data distribution
with clients' private data and allow the server LLM to generate particular
knowledge to improve clients' SLMs. The extensive experimental results
demonstrate that the proposed FDKT framework consistently and greatly improves
SLMs' task performance by around 5\% with a privacy budget of less than 10,
compared to local training on private data.