Align Before Aggregation: Basis-Consistent Federated LoRA under Heterogeneous Ranks

Abstract

Federated fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs) under heterogeneous client capacities is increasingly important, and low-rank adaptation (LoRA) with heterogeneous ranks makes it practical. Existing server-side aggregators compose local matrix updates $ΔW_i$ from client-specific LoRA factors $(A_i,B_i)$ before aggregating them. Although these matrix updates lie in the same weight space $\mathbb{R}^{m\times n}$ and can be averaged directly, the LoRA factors that generate them may expressed client-specific local basis. In the typical compose--aggregate--factorize--dispatch loop, this basis inconsistency can make the rank-$r_i$ reference prefix dispatched to lower-rank clients unstable after server-side refactorization. In this work, we propose \textbf{FedAbA}, a basis-consistent federated LoRA aggregation framework for heterogeneous ranks. FedAbA first extracts each client's local basis, aligns it to the corresponding prefix of the global reference basis, and constructs a basis-consistent reconstruction of each local matrix update before aggregation. It then aggregates these reconstructions with weights that combine client data size and consistency score, followed by exact coefficient-space SVD refactorization and gauge fixing before rank-prefix dispatch. Our theoretical analysis clarifies the role of basis consistency and supports the proposed consistency-aware aggregation mechanism. Extensive experiments show that FedAbA outperforms representative federated LoRA baselines, with the largest gains under the strongest rank heterogeneity.