CARE-FL: Federated Fine-Tuning of Multimodal LLMs in Resource-Constrained Edge Networks

Abstract

Domain-specific adaptation of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in privacy-sensitive edge environments requires federated fine-tuning, yet client selection remains challenging due to heterogeneous multimodal data and modality availability, dynamic system conditions, and evolving client utility during training. We propose Constraint-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Efficient Federated Fine-Tuning (CARE-FL), a constrained online client-selection framework for federated MLLM Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) fine-tuning. CARE-FL formulates client participation as a sequential decision process and employs Q-value decomposition to address the large combinatorial joint action space through scalable client-level long-term utility estimation. These utilities are learned online using a modified Double Deep Q-Learning (DDQL) scheme, while constraint-aware $ε$-greedy execution selects feasible client subsets under per-round latency and bandwidth constraints. Complementing client selection, an adaptive aggregation mechanism further controls potentially unstable global updates and places greater weight on the previous model when needed. Experiments on the CrisisMMD disaster-response task in emulated heterogeneous wireless edge environments show that CARE-FL achieves higher and more stable test accuracy than the compared client-selection baselines across different system settings, while satisfying the imposed latency and bandwidth constraints.