Abstract:High-quality training data is instrumental in pre-trained language models (PLMs), yet privacy concerns often preclude the centralized collection of data from many professional domains. Federated learning offers a solution by enabling model training while safeguarding data privacy. However, the limited resources of federated learning clients pose a challenge to the training of pre-trained language models. This study addresses this issue through several steps. Firstly, it defines the problem of completing model training with limited resources and explores strategies to balance computational and communication costs for optimizing training efficiency. Secondly, it introduces an efficient federated learning framework for BERT further pre-training and fine-tuning (FedBT). FedBT facilitates the training of the BERT model on federated learning clients, encompassing both further pre-training and downstream task fine-tuning. Depending on the application context, FedBT selectively trains key parameters of the BERT model at the clients, uploading only the updated parameters to the server for aggregation. This approach significantly reduces both computational and communication overhead during training. Finally, extensive experiments are conducted on datasets from multiple professional domains. Results demonstrate that FedBT reduces client-side computational costs to 34.31% and communication costs to 7.04% during further pre-training. In downstream task fine-tuning, it reduces client-side computational costs to 48.26% and communication costs to 20.19%. The accuracy achieved in both pre-training and downstream task fine-tuning is comparable to traditional federated learning methods that train the entire model.