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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…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have fundamentally altered how we approach scaling in machine learning. However, these models pose substantial computational and memory challenges, primarily due to the reliance on matrix multiplication (MatMul)…
Large Language Models (LLMs), while demonstrating remarkable capabilities across various applications, present significant challenges during inference due to their substantial model size, especially when deployed on edge devices. Activation…
It is important to scale out deep neural network (DNN) training for reducing model training time. The high communication overhead is one of the major performance bottlenecks for distributed DNN training across multiple GPUs. Our…
Current PEFT methods for LLMs can achieve either high quality, efficient training, or scalable serving, but not all three simultaneously. To address this limitation, we investigate sparse fine-tuning and observe a remarkable improvement in…
Feed-forward neural networks consist of a sequence of layers, in which each layer performs some processing on the information from the previous layer. A downside to this approach is that each layer (or module, as multiple modules can…
Deep neural networks (DNNs) are becoming increasingly deeper, wider, and non-linear due to the growing demands on prediction accuracy and analysis quality. When training a DNN model, the intermediate activation data must be saved in the…
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…
Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) have received increasing attention in recent years with applications that span a wide range of disciplines including vital domains such as medicine, network security and autonomous transportation. However,…
The incessant advent of online services demands high speed and efficient recommender systems (ReS) that can maintain real-time performance along with processing very complex user-item interactions. The present study, therefore, considers…
We propose Sparse Neural Network architectures that are based on random or structured bipartite graph topologies. Sparse architectures provide compression of the models learned and speed-ups of computations, they can also surpass their…
RAPID-LLM is a unified performance modeling framework for large language model (LLM) training and inference on GPU clusters. It couples a DeepFlow-based frontend that generates hardware-aware, operator-level Chakra execution traces from an…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are composed of neurons that exhibit various behaviors and roles, which become increasingly diversified as models scale. Recent studies have revealed that not all neurons are active across different datasets,…
The evolving sophistication and intricacies of Large Language Models (LLMs) yield unprecedented advancements, yet they simultaneously demand considerable computational resources and incur significant costs. To alleviate these challenges,…
Sparse neural networks have been widely applied to reduce the computational demands of training and deploying over-parameterized deep neural networks. For inference acceleration, methods that discover a sparse network from a pre-trained…
Neural networks have become dominant computational workloads across cloud and edge platforms, but their rapid growth in model size and deployment diversity has exposed hardware bottlenecks increasingly dominated by memory movement,…
Recently, sparse training methods have started to be established as a de facto approach for training and inference efficiency in artificial neural networks. Yet, this efficiency is just in theory. In practice, everyone uses a binary mask to…
Ternary quantization has emerged as a powerful technique for reducing both computational and memory footprint of large language models (LLM), enabling efficient real-time inference deployment without significantly compromising model…
Rectifier neuron units (ReLUs) have been widely used in deep convolutional networks. An ReLU converts negative values to zeros, and does not change positive values, which leads to a high sparsity of neurons. In this work, we first examine…
Machine learning, particularly deep neural network inference, has become a vital workload for many computing systems, from data centers and HPC systems to edge-based computing. As advances in sparsity have helped improve the efficiency of…