Related papers: Beyond 2:4: exploring V:N:M sparsity for efficient…

Scaling autoregressive large language models (LLMs) has driven unprecedented progress but comes with vast computational costs. In this work, we tackle these costs by leveraging unstructured sparsity within an LLM's feedforward layers, the…

Traditional pruning methods are known to be challenging to work in Large Language Models (LLMs) for Generative AI because of their unaffordable training process and large computational demands. For the first time, we introduce the…

Large vision-language models (VLMs) enable joint processing of text and images. However, incorporating vision data significantly increases the prompt length, resulting in a longer time to first token (TTFT). This bottleneck can be…

Training deep neural networks (DNNs) is costly. Fortunately, Nvidia Ampere and Hopper GPUs can accelerate matrix multiplications twice as fast as a dense equivalent by implementing 2:4 sparsity. However, previous STE-based 2:4 pre-training…

Large language models (LLMs) are popular around the world due to their powerful understanding capabilities. As the core component of LLMs, accelerating Transformer through parallelization has gradually become a hot research topic. Mask…

Sparsity is a well-studied technique for compressing deep neural networks (DNNs) without compromising performance. In deep reinforcement learning (DRL), neural networks with up to 5% of their original weights can still be trained with…

We demonstrate the possibility of what we call sparse learning: accelerated training of deep neural networks that maintain sparse weights throughout training while achieving dense performance levels. We accomplish this by developing sparse…

Structured sparsity accelerates training and inference on modern GPUs, yet it still trails unstructured dynamic sparse training (DST) in accuracy. The shortfall stems from a loss of expressivity: whereas a dense layer can realize every…

Large language models (LLMs) have made significant strides in complex tasks, yet their widespread adoption is impeded by substantial computational demands. With hundreds of billion parameters, transformer-based LLMs necessitate months of…

The energy consumption of large-scale ML models is dominated by data movement, shuffling billions of parameters across memory hierarchies and data centers. Sparsification offers a principled way to mitigate these costs by pruning redundant…

Semi-structured N:M sparsity and low-bit quantization (e.g., 1.58-bit BitNet) are two promising approaches for improving the efficiency of large language models (LLMs), yet they have largely been studied in isolation. In this work, we…

While Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have achieved breakthroughs in video generation, this long sequence generation task remains constrained by the quadratic complexity of attention mechanisms, resulting in significant inference latency.…

Structured sparsity enables deploying large language models (LLMs) on resource-constrained systems. Approaches like dense-to-sparse fine-tuning are particularly compelling, achieving remarkable structured sparsity by reducing the model size…

Large Transformer models yield impressive results on many tasks, but are expensive to train, or even fine-tune, and so slow at decoding that their use and study becomes out of reach. We address this problem by leveraging sparsity. We study…

We consider the problem of accurate sparse fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs), that is, fine-tuning pretrained LLMs on specialized tasks, while inducing sparsity in their weights. On the accuracy side, we observe that standard…

The employment of high-performance servers and GPU accelerators for training deep neural network models have greatly accelerated recent advances in deep learning (DL). DL frameworks, such as TensorFlow, MXNet, and Caffe2, have emerged to…

In deep learning, fine-grained N:M sparsity reduces the data footprint and bandwidth of a General Matrix multiply (GEMM) up to x2, and doubles throughput by skipping computation of zero values. So far, it was mainly only used to prune…

Vision transformers (ViTs) have recently received explosive popularity, but their enormous model sizes and training costs remain daunting. Conventional post-training pruning often incurs higher training budgets. In contrast, this paper aims…

Sparsity-aware training is an effective approach for transforming large language models (LLMs) into hardware-friendly sparse patterns, thereby reducing latency and memory consumption during inference. In this paper, we propose Continuous…

Sparsity has long been a central theme in LLM efficiency, but its role in context processing remains unresolved. As LLM workloads shift toward longer contexts and agentic interactions, the compute and memory bottlenecks of attention become…