Extreme Compression of Large Language Models via Additive Quantization

The emergence of accurate open large language models (LLMs) has led to a race towards quantization techniques for such models enabling execution on end-user devices. In this paper, we revisit the problem of "extreme" LLM compression--defined as targeting extremely low bit counts, such as 2 to 3 bits per parameter, from the point of view of classic methods in Multi-Codebook Quantization (MCQ). Our work builds on top of Additive Quantization, a classic algorithm from the MCQ family, and adapts it to the quantization of language models. The resulting algorithm advances the state-of-the-art in LLM compression, outperforming all recently-proposed techniques in terms of accuracy at a given compression budget. For instance, when compressing Llama 2 models to 2 bits per parameter, our algorithm quantizes the 7B model to 6.93 perplexity (a 1.29 improvement relative to the best prior work, and 1.81 points from FP16), the 13B model to 5.70 perplexity (a .36 improvement) and the 70B model to 3.94 perplexity (a .22 improvement) on WikiText2. We release our implementation of Additive Quantization for Language Models AQLM as a baseline to facilitate future research in LLM quantization.

How to Prune Your Language Model: Recovering Accuracy on the "Sparsity May Cry'' Benchmark

Pruning large language models (LLMs) from the BERT family has emerged as a standard compression benchmark, and several pruning methods have been proposed for this task. The recent ``Sparsity May Cry'' (SMC) benchmark put into question the validity of all existing methods, exhibiting a more complex setup where many known pruning methods appear to fail. We revisit the question of accurate BERT-pruning during fine-tuning on downstream datasets, and propose a set of general guidelines for successful pruning, even on the challenging SMC benchmark. First, we perform a cost-vs-benefits analysis of pruning model components, such as the embeddings and the classification head; second, we provide a simple-yet-general way of scaling training, sparsification and learning rate schedules relative to the desired target sparsity; finally, we investigate the importance of proper parametrization for Knowledge Distillation in the context of LLMs. Our simple insights lead to state-of-the-art results, both on classic BERT-pruning benchmarks, as well as on the SMC benchmark, showing that even classic gradual magnitude pruning (GMP) can yield competitive results, with the right approach.

ELSA: Partial Weight Freezing for Overhead-Free Sparse Network Deployment

We present ELSA, a practical solution for creating deep networks that can easily be deployed at different levels of sparsity. The core idea is to embed one or more sparse networks within a single dense network as a proper subset of the weights. At prediction time, any sparse model can be extracted effortlessly simply be zeroing out weights according to a predefined mask. ELSA is simple, powerful and highly flexible. It can use essentially any existing technique for network sparsification and network training. In particular, it does not restrict the loss function, architecture or the optimization technique. Our experiments show that ELSA's advantages of flexible deployment comes with no or just a negligible reduction in prediction quality compared to the standard way of using multiple sparse networks that are trained and stored independently.

AsGrad: A Sharp Unified Analysis of Asynchronous-SGD Algorithms

We analyze asynchronous-type algorithms for distributed SGD in the heterogeneous setting, where each worker has its own computation and communication speeds, as well as data distribution. In these algorithms, workers compute possibly stale and stochastic gradients associated with their local data at some iteration back in history and then return those gradients to the server without synchronizing with other workers. We present a unified convergence theory for non-convex smooth functions in the heterogeneous regime. The proposed analysis provides convergence for pure asynchronous SGD and its various modifications. Moreover, our theory explains what affects the convergence rate and what can be done to improve the performance of asynchronous algorithms. In particular, we introduce a novel asynchronous method based on worker shuffling. As a by-product of our analysis, we also demonstrate convergence guarantees for gradient-type algorithms such as SGD with random reshuffling and shuffle-once mini-batch SGD. The derived rates match the best-known results for those algorithms, highlighting the tightness of our approach. Finally, our numerical evaluations support theoretical findings and show the good practical performance of our method.

QMoE: Practical Sub-1-Bit Compression of Trillion-Parameter Models

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures offer a general solution to the high inference costs of large language models (LLMs) via sparse routing, bringing faster and more accurate models, at the cost of massive parameter counts. For example, the SwitchTransformer-c2048 model has 1.6 trillion parameters, requiring 3.2TB of accelerator memory to run efficiently, which makes practical deployment challenging and expensive. In this paper, we present a solution to this memory problem, in form of a new compression and execution framework called QMoE. Specifically, QMoE consists of a scalable algorithm which accurately compresses trillion-parameter MoEs to less than 1 bit per parameter, in a custom format co-designed with bespoke GPU decoding kernels to facilitate efficient end-to-end compressed inference, with minor runtime overheads relative to uncompressed execution. Concretely, QMoE can compress the 1.6 trillion parameter SwitchTransformer-c2048 model to less than 160GB (20x compression, 0.8 bits per parameter) at only minor accuracy loss, in less than a day on a single GPU. This enables, for the first time, the execution of a trillion-parameter model on affordable commodity hardware, like a single server with 4x NVIDIA A6000 or 8x NVIDIA 3090 GPUs, at less than 5% runtime overhead relative to ideal uncompressed inference. The source code and compressed models are available at github.com/IST-DASLab/qmoe.

Sparse Fine-tuning for Inference Acceleration of Large Language Models

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 loss-based fine-tuning may fail to recover accuracy, especially at high sparsities. To address this, we perform a detailed study of distillation-type losses, determining an L2-based distillation approach we term SquareHead which enables accurate recovery even at higher sparsities, across all model types. On the practical efficiency side, we show that sparse LLMs can be executed with speedups by taking advantage of sparsity, for both CPU and GPU runtimes. While the standard approach is to leverage sparsity for computational reduction, we observe that in the case of memory-bound LLMs sparsity can also be leveraged for reducing memory bandwidth. We exhibit end-to-end results showing speedups due to sparsity, while recovering accuracy, on T5 (language translation), Whisper (speech translation), and open GPT-type (MPT for text generation). For MPT text generation, we show for the first time that sparse fine-tuning can reach 75% sparsity without accuracy drops, provide notable end-to-end speedups for both CPU and GPU inference, and highlight that sparsity is also compatible with quantization approaches. Models and software for reproducing our results are provided in Section 6.

Towards End-to-end 4-Bit Inference on Generative Large Language Models

We show that the majority of the inference computations for large generative models such as LLaMA and OPT can be performed with both weights and activations being cast to 4 bits, in a way that leads to practical speedups while at the same time maintaining good accuracy. We achieve this via a hybrid quantization strategy called QUIK, which compresses most of the weights and activations to 4-bit, while keeping some outlier weights and activations in higher-precision. Crucially, our scheme is designed with computational efficiency in mind: we provide GPU kernels with highly-efficient layer-wise runtimes, which lead to practical end-to-end throughput improvements of up to 3.1x relative to FP16 execution. Code and models are provided at https://github.com/IST-DASLab/QUIK.

SPADE: Sparsity-Guided Debugging for Deep Neural Networks

Interpretability, broadly defined as mechanisms for understanding why and how machine learning models reach their decisions, is one of the key open goals at the intersection of deep learning theory and practice. Towards this goal, multiple tools have been proposed to aid a human examiner in reasoning about a network's behavior in general or on a set of instances. However, the outputs of these tools-such as input saliency maps or neuron visualizations-are frequently difficult for a human to interpret, or even misleading, due, in particular, to the fact that neurons can be multifaceted, i.e., a single neuron can be associated with multiple distinct feature combinations. In this paper, we present a new general approach to address this problem, called SPADE, which, given a trained model and a target sample, uses sample-targeted pruning to provide a "trace" of the network's execution on the sample, reducing the network to the connections that are most relevant to the specific prediction. We demonstrate that preprocessing with SPADE significantly increases both the accuracy of image saliency maps across several interpretability methods and the usefulness of neuron visualizations, aiding humans in reasoning about network behavior. Our findings show that sample-specific pruning of connections can disentangle multifaceted neurons, leading to consistently improved interpretability.

Scaling Laws for Sparsely-Connected Foundation Models

We explore the impact of parameter sparsity on the scaling behavior of Transformers trained on massive datasets (i.e., "foundation models"), in both vision and language domains. In this setting, we identify the first scaling law describing the relationship between weight sparsity, number of non-zero parameters, and amount of training data, which we validate empirically across model and data scales; on ViT/JFT-4B and T5/C4. These results allow us to characterize the "optimal sparsity", the sparsity level which yields the best performance for a given effective model size and training budget. For a fixed number of non-zero parameters, we identify that the optimal sparsity increases with the amount of data used for training. We also extend our study to different sparsity structures (such as the hardware-friendly n:m pattern) and strategies (such as starting from a pretrained dense model). Our findings shed light on the power and limitations of weight sparsity across various parameter and computational settings, offering both theoretical understanding and practical implications for leveraging sparsity towards computational efficiency improvements.

Accurate Neural Network Pruning Requires Rethinking Sparse Optimization

Obtaining versions of deep neural networks that are both highly-accurate and highly-sparse is one of the main challenges in the area of model compression, and several high-performance pruning techniques have been investigated by the community. Yet, much less is known about the interaction between sparsity and the standard stochastic optimization techniques used for training sparse networks, and most existing work uses standard dense schedules and hyperparameters for training sparse networks. In this work, we examine the impact of high sparsity on model training using the standard computer vision and natural language processing sparsity benchmarks. We begin by showing that using standard dense training recipes for sparse training is suboptimal, and results in under-training. We provide new approaches for mitigating this issue for both sparse pre-training of vision models (e.g. ResNet50/ImageNet) and sparse fine-tuning of language models (e.g. BERT/GLUE), achieving state-of-the-art results in both settings in the high-sparsity regime, and providing detailed analyses for the difficulty of sparse training in both scenarios. Our work sets a new threshold in terms of the accuracies that can be achieved under high sparsity, and should inspire further research into improving sparse model training, to reach higher accuracies under high sparsity, but also to do so efficiently.