Evaluating Federated Pre-Training: On the Reliability of Downstream Fine-Tuning and Intrinsic Evaluation

arXiv:2607.28658v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Federated pre-training offers a way to train foundation models on private or distributed data without centralizing the underlying datasets. However, evaluating federated pre-training remains challenging because differences in client participation and local data availability can make directly comparable evaluation difficult. Moreover, pre-training test perplexity is tied to the pre-training distribution, while downstream benchmarks introduce task-sp...