MediSwift: Efficient Sparse Pre-trained Biomedical Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Thangarasa, Vithursan, Salem, Mahmoud, Saxena, Shreyas, Leong, Kevin, Hestness, Joel, Lie, Sean
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Thangarasa, Vithursan
Salem, Mahmoud
Saxena, Shreyas
Leong, Kevin
Hestness, Joel
Lie, Sean
author_facet Thangarasa, Vithursan
Salem, Mahmoud
Saxena, Shreyas
Leong, Kevin
Hestness, Joel
Lie, Sean
contents Large language models (LLMs) are typically trained on general source data for various domains, but a recent surge in domain-specific LLMs has shown their potential to outperform general-purpose models in domain-specific tasks (e.g., biomedicine). Although domain-specific pre-training enhances efficiency and leads to smaller models, the computational costs of training these LLMs remain high, posing budgeting challenges. We introduce MediSwift, a suite of biomedical LMs that leverage sparse pre-training on domain-specific biomedical text data. By inducing up to 75% weight sparsity during the pre-training phase, MediSwift achieves a 2-2.5x reduction in training FLOPs. Notably, all sparse pre-training was performed on the Cerebras CS-2 system, which is specifically designed to realize the acceleration benefits from unstructured weight sparsity, thereby significantly enhancing the efficiency of the MediSwift models. Through subsequent dense fine-tuning and strategic soft prompting, MediSwift models outperform existing LLMs up to 7B parameters on biomedical tasks, setting new benchmarks w.r.t efficiency-accuracy on tasks such as PubMedQA. Our results show that sparse pre-training, along with dense fine-tuning and soft prompting, offers an effective method for creating high-performing, computationally efficient models in specialized domains.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_00952
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MediSwift: Efficient Sparse Pre-trained Biomedical Language Models
Thangarasa, Vithursan
Salem, Mahmoud
Saxena, Shreyas
Leong, Kevin
Hestness, Joel
Lie, Sean
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
Large language models (LLMs) are typically trained on general source data for various domains, but a recent surge in domain-specific LLMs has shown their potential to outperform general-purpose models in domain-specific tasks (e.g., biomedicine). Although domain-specific pre-training enhances efficiency and leads to smaller models, the computational costs of training these LLMs remain high, posing budgeting challenges. We introduce MediSwift, a suite of biomedical LMs that leverage sparse pre-training on domain-specific biomedical text data. By inducing up to 75% weight sparsity during the pre-training phase, MediSwift achieves a 2-2.5x reduction in training FLOPs. Notably, all sparse pre-training was performed on the Cerebras CS-2 system, which is specifically designed to realize the acceleration benefits from unstructured weight sparsity, thereby significantly enhancing the efficiency of the MediSwift models. Through subsequent dense fine-tuning and strategic soft prompting, MediSwift models outperform existing LLMs up to 7B parameters on biomedical tasks, setting new benchmarks w.r.t efficiency-accuracy on tasks such as PubMedQA. Our results show that sparse pre-training, along with dense fine-tuning and soft prompting, offers an effective method for creating high-performing, computationally efficient models in specialized domains.
title MediSwift: Efficient Sparse Pre-trained Biomedical Language Models
topic Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.00952