PPC-GPT: Federated Task-Specific Compression of Large Language Models via Pruning and Chain-of-Thought Distillation

Compressing Large Language Models (LLMs) into task-specific Small Language Models (SLMs) encounters two significant challenges: safeguarding domain-specific knowledge privacy and managing limited resources. To tackle these challenges, we propose PPC-GPT, a innovative privacy-preserving federated framework specifically designed for compressing LLMs into task-specific SLMs via pruning and Chain-of-Thought (COT) distillation. PPC-GPT works on a server-client federated architecture, where the client sends differentially private (DP) perturbed task-specific data to the server's LLM. The LLM then generates synthetic data along with their corresponding rationales. This synthetic data is subsequently used for both LLM pruning and retraining processes. Additionally, we harness COT knowledge distillation, leveraging the synthetic data to further improve the retraining of structurally-pruned SLMs. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of PPC-GPT across various text generation tasks. By compressing LLMs into task-specific SLMs, PPC-GPT not only achieves competitive performance but also prioritizes data privacy protection.

@article{fan2025_2502.15857,
  title={ PPC-GPT: Federated Task-Specific Compression of Large Language Models via Pruning and Chain-of-Thought Distillation },
  author={ Tao Fan and Guoqiang Ma and Yuanfeng Song and Lixin Fan and Kai Chen and Qiang Yang },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.15857},
  year={ 2025 }
}