Now It Sounds Like You: Learning Personalized Vocabulary On Device

Abstract: In recent years, Federated Learning (FL) has shown significant advancements in its ability to perform various NLP tasks. This work focuses on applying personalized FL for on-device language modeling. Due to limitations of memory and latency, these models cannot support the complexity of sub-word tokenization or beam search decoding, resulting in the decision to deploy a closed-vocabulary LLM. However, closed-vocabulary models are unable to handle out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words belonging to specific users. To address this issue, We propose a novel technique called "OOV expansion" that improves OOV coverage and increases model accuracy while minimizing the impact on memory and latency. This method introduces a personalized "OOV adapter" that effectively transfers knowledge from a central model and learns word embedding for personalized vocabulary. OOV expansion significantly outperforms standard FL personalization methods on a set of common FL benchmarks.