Related papers: Training-Free Activation Sparsity in Large Languag…

A core component present in many successful neural network architectures, is an MLP block of two fully connected layers with a non-linear activation in between. An intriguing phenomenon observed empirically, including in transformer…

A recent empirical observation (Li et al., 2022b) of activation sparsity in MLP blocks offers an opportunity to drastically reduce computation costs for free. Although having attributed it to training dynamics, existing theoretical…

The impressive capabilities of large foundation models come at a cost of substantial computing resources to serve them. Compressing these pre-trained models is of practical interest as it can democratize deploying them to the machine…

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated high performance on tasks expressed in natural language, particularly in zero- or few-shot settings. These are typically framed as supervised (e.g., classification) or unsupervised (e.g.,…

The discovery of the lazy neuron phenomenon in trained Transformers, where the vast majority of neurons in their feed-forward networks (FFN) are inactive for each token, has spurred tremendous interests in activation sparsity for enhancing…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are highly accurate in classification tasks, however, substantial computational and financial costs hinder their large-scale deployment in dynamic environments. Knowledge Distillation (KD) where a LLM "teacher"…

State-of-the-art Learned Sparse Retrieval (LSR) models, such as Splade, typically employ a Language Modeling (LM) head to project latent hidden states into a lexically-anchored logit matrix. This intermediate matrix is subsequently…

The high power consumption and latency-sensitive deployments of large language models (LLMs) have motivated efficiency techniques like quantization and sparsity. Contextual sparsity, where the sparsity pattern is input-dependent, is crucial…

Training large transformer models is one of the most important computational challenges of modern AI. In this paper, we show how to significantly accelerate training of large transformer models by reducing activation recomputation.…

Despite the efficacy of network sparsity in alleviating the deployment strain of Large Language Models (LLMs), it endures significant performance degradation. Applying Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to fine-tune the sparse LLMs offers an…

We introduce stochastic activations. This novel strategy randomly selects between several non-linear functions in the feed-forward layer of a large language model. In particular, we choose between SILU or RELU depending on a Bernoulli draw.…

We investigate the origins of massive activations in large language models (LLMs) and identify a specific layer named the \textbf{Massive Emergence Layer (ME Layer)}, that is consistently observed across model families, where massive…

Accelerating the learning of Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) from experimental data will speed up the pace of scientific discovery. Previous randomized algorithms exploit sparsity in PDE updates for acceleration. However such methods…

Deep artificial neural networks achieve surprising generalization abilities that remain poorly understood. In this paper, we present a new approach to analyzing generalization for deep feed-forward ReLU networks that takes advantage of the…

Unstructured sparsity is now natively accelerated by recent GPU kernels and dataflow hardware, shifting the bottleneck from inference execution to the pruning algorithm. State-of-the-art methods for unstructured LLM pruning are layer-wise…

Large language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable skills across various domains. Understanding the mechanisms behind their abilities and implementing controls over them is becoming increasingly important for developing better…

Large language models (LLMs) are routinely pre-trained on billions of tokens, only to start the process over again once new data becomes available. A much more efficient solution is to continually pre-train these models, saving significant…

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit impressive capabilities but often hallucinate, confidently providing incorrect answers instead of admitting ignorance. Prior work has shown that models encode linear representations of their own…

Sparse attention offers a promising strategy to extend long-context capabilities in Transformer LLMs, yet its efficiency-accuracy trade-offs remain unclear due to the lack of comprehensive evaluation. We address this gap with the…

Multilingual large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong cross-linguistic generalization, yet medium to low resource languages underperform on common benchmarks such as ARC-Challenge, MMLU, and HellaSwag. We analyze activation patterns in…