Sparsity-accelerated Training For Large Language Models

Ma Da, Chen Lu, Wang Pengyu, Xu Hongshen, Li Hanqi, Sun Liangtai, Zhu Su, Fan Shuai, Yu Kai. Arxiv 2024

[Paper] [Code]    
Fine Tuning Has Code Pretraining Methods RAG Tools Training Techniques

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 associated with this, primarily due to their large parameter count, remain high. This paper proposes leveraging sparsity in pre-trained LLMs to expedite this training process. By observing sparsity in activated neurons during forward iterations, we identify the potential for computational speed-ups by excluding inactive neurons. We address associated challenges by extending existing neuron importance evaluation metrics and introducing a ladder omission rate scheduler. Our experiments on Llama-2 demonstrate that Sparsity-Accelerated Training (SAT) achieves comparable or superior performance to standard training while significantly accelerating the process. Specifically, SAT achieves a \(45%\) throughput improvement in continual pre-training and saves \(38%\) training time in supervised fine-tuning in practice. It offers a simple, hardware-agnostic, and easily deployable framework for additional LLM training. Our code is available at https://github.com/OpenDFM/SAT.

Similar Work