Related papers: The Sharpness Disparity Principle in Transformers …

Training large transformers is slow, but recent innovations on GPU architecture give us an advantage. NVIDIA Ampere GPUs can execute a fine-grained 2:4 sparse matrix multiplication twice as fast as its dense equivalent. In the light of this…

In this paper, we address the challenge of determining the layer-wise sparsity rates of large language models (LLMs) through a theoretical perspective. Specifically, we identify a critical issue of ''$\textbf{reconstruction error…

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated proficiency across various natural language processing (NLP) tasks but often require additional training, such as continual pre-training and supervised fine-tuning. However, the costs…

This paper explores Large Batch Training techniques using layer-wise adaptive scaling ratio (LARS) across diverse settings, uncovering insights. LARS algorithms with warm-up tend to be trapped in sharp minimizers early on due to redundant…

Masked diffusion models (MDMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive models (ARMs) for language modeling. However, MDMs are known to learn substantially more slowly than ARMs, which may become problematic when scaling…

We present a new training methodology for transformers using a multilevel, layer-parallel approach. Through a neural ODE formulation of transformers, our application of a multilevel parallel-in-time algorithm for the forward and…

In this work, we introduce a novel approach for optimizing LLM training by adjusting learning rates across weights of different components in Transformer models. Traditional methods often apply a uniform learning rate across all network…

Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive performance in generative tasks but also introduce significant challenges in real-world serving due to inefficient use of the expensive, computation-optimized accelerators.…

Hyperparameter transfer allows extrapolating optimal optimization hyperparameters from small to large scales, making it critical for training large language models (LLMs). This is done either by fitting a scaling law to the hyperparameters…

Trainings of Large Language Models are generally bottlenecked by matrix multiplications. In the Transformer architecture, a large portion of these operations happens in the Feed Forward Network (FFN), and this portion increases for larger…

Full fine-tuning of Large Language Models (LLMs) is notoriously memory-intensive, primarily because conventional optimizers such as SGD or Adam assume access to exact gradients derived from cached activations. Existing solutions either…

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized Natural Language Processing (NLP), but their size creates computational bottlenecks. We introduce a novel approach to create accurate, sparse foundational versions of performant LLMs that…

Transformer-based self-supervised models are trained as feature extractors and have empowered many downstream speech tasks to achieve state-of-the-art performance. However, both the training and inference process of these models may…

Diffusion language models (dLMs) have emerged as a promising paradigm that enables parallel, non-autoregressive generation, but their learning efficiency lags behind that of autoregressive (AR) language models when trained from scratch. To…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are not only resource-intensive to train but even more costly to deploy in production. Therefore, recent work has attempted to prune blocks of LLMs based on cheap proxies for estimating block importance,…

Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) have emerged as a promising paradigm for parallel token generation, with block-wise variants garnering significant research interest. Despite their potential, existing dLLMs typically suffer from a…

The Transformer is widely used in natural language processing tasks. To train a Transformer however, one usually needs a carefully designed learning rate warm-up stage, which is shown to be crucial to the final performance but will slow…

As Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve remarkable empirical success through scaling model and data size, pretraining has become increasingly critical yet computationally prohibitive, hindering rapid development. Despite the availability of…

It is widely believed that stochastic gradient descent (SGD) performs significantly worse than adaptive optimizers such as Adam in pre-training Large Language Models (LLMs). Yet the underlying reason for this gap remains unclear. In this…

As the parameters of Large Language Models (LLMs) have scaled to hundreds of billions, the demand for efficient training methods -- balancing faster computation and reduced memory usage without sacrificing accuracy -- has become more…