Related papers: Accelerating Transformer Inference and Training wi…

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…

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…

Exploiting activation sparsity is a promising approach to significantly accelerating the inference process of large language models (LLMs) without compromising performance. However, activation sparsity is determined by activation functions,…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable capabilities, but their immense computational demands during training remain a critical bottleneck for widespread adoption. Low-rank training has received attention in recent years due…

Large Language Models (LLMs) with billions of parameters have drastically transformed AI applications. However, their demanding computation during inference has raised significant challenges for deployment on resource-constrained devices.…

To date, 2:4 sparsity has stood as the only sparse pattern that can be accelerated using sparse tensor cores on GPUs. In practice, 2:4 sparsity often possesses low actual speedups ($\leq 1.3$) and requires fixed sparse ratios, meaning that…

The demand for efficient processing of deep neural networks (DNNs) on embedded devices is a significant challenge limiting their deployment. Exploiting sparsity in the network's feature maps is one of the ways to reduce its inference…

Leveraging sparsity is crucial for optimizing large language model inference. however, modern LLMs employing SiLU as their activation function exhibit minimal activation sparsity. Recent research has proposed replacing SiLU with ReLU to…

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…

Contextual sparsity is one of the approaches used to reduce computational complexity in the inference process of large language models (LLMs). Existing techniques for efficient LLM inference acceleration based on contextual sparsity with…

Inducing and leveraging sparse activations during training and inference is a promising avenue for improving the computational efficiency of deep networks, which is increasingly important as network sizes continue to grow and their…

Our community has greatly improved the efficiency of deep learning applications, including by exploiting sparsity in inputs. Most of that work, though, is for inference, where weight sparsity is known statically, and/or for specialized…

The Transformer has been an indispensable staple in deep learning. However, for real-life applications, it is very challenging to deploy efficient Transformers due to immense parameters and operations of models. To relieve this burden,…

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…

The prefill stage of large language model (LLM) inference is a key computational bottleneck for long-context workloads. At short-to-moderate context lengths (1K--16K tokens), Feed-Forward Networks (FFNs) dominate this cost, accounting for…

Activation sparsity refers to the existence of considerable weakly-contributed elements among activation outputs. As a prevalent property of the models using the ReLU activation function, activation sparsity has been proven a promising…

In recent years, there has been a flurry of research in deep neural network pruning and compression. Early approaches prune weights individually. However, it is difficult to take advantage of the resulting unstructured sparsity patterns on…

In trained deep neural networks, unstructured pruning can reduce redundant weights to lower storage cost. However, it requires the customization of hardwares to speed up practical inference. Another trend accelerates sparse model inference…

Training Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) usually requires a large number of computational resources. In this paper, \textit{SparseTrain} is proposed to accelerate CNN training by fully exploiting the sparsity. It mainly involves three…

Exploiting sparsity underlying neural networks has become one of the most potential methodologies to reduce the memory footprint, I/O cost, and computation workloads during inference. And the degree of sparsity one can exploit has become…