DLO: Dynamic Layer Operation For Efficient Vertical Scaling Of Llms

Tan Zhen, Dong Daize, Zhao Xinyu, Peng Jie, Cheng Yu, Chen Tianlong. Arxiv 2024

[Paper]    
Efficiency And Optimization Fine Tuning Model Architecture Pretraining Methods Tools Training Techniques Transformer

In this paper, we introduce Dynamic Layer Operations (DLO), a novel approach for vertically scaling transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) by dynamically expanding, activating, or skipping layers using a sophisticated routing policy based on layerwise feature similarity. Unlike traditional Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) methods that focus on extending the model width, our approach targets model depth, addressing the redundancy observed across layer representations for various input samples. Our framework is integrated with the Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) stage, eliminating the need for resource-intensive Continual Pre-Training (CPT). Experimental results demonstrate that DLO not only outperforms the original unscaled models but also achieves comparable results to densely expanded models with significantly improved efficiency. Our work offers a promising direction for building efficient yet powerful LLMs. We will release our implementation and model weights upon acceptance.

Similar Work